Pioneering actor Ossie Davis dies at 87

Posted:
Feb 4, 2005

Actor Ossie Davis, whose over half-century of roles in stage and screen helped pioneer roles for African-American actors, is dead at 87.

Davis provided the voice of Yar in the feature film Dinosaur, released in 2000 by Walt Disney Studios. The picture combined live-action backgrounds with computer-animated characters and effects.

He also voiced the Shoemaker and the Narrator in The Red Shoes. Based on the Hans Christian Anderson story and co-produced by Michael Sporn Animation and Italtoons, it aired on HBO in 1989. The animated-on-paper production won numerous awards.

Police and his office in Los Angeles said that the actor was found dead early Friday by his grandson and paramedics at the Shore Club hotel in Miami Beach, where he had been shooting the film Retirement.

"According to the grandson, he was suffering from heart disease. The grandson knocked on the door, and when Mr. Davis didn't respond, he called fire rescue," police spokesman Bobby Hernandez said.

Davis and actress Ruby Dee, his wife of over 50 years, often appeared in films together. They received Kennedy Center Honors last year for their collected work.

He acted in the Spike Lee films School Daze, Jungle Fever and Do the Right Thing, as well as such TV series as Evening Shade (1990-94).

Born in tiny Cogdell, Georgia, on December 18, 1917, Davis was the oldest of five children. He grew up in nearby Waycross and Valdosta.

Leaving home in 1935, he hitchhiked to Washington to enter Howard University. There, he studied drama, planning to be a playwright.

Davis and Dee made their first appearance together in the plays Jeb (1946) and Anna Lucasta (1946-47). No Way Out (1950) was Davis' first film and Dee's fifth.

Both had major roles in the TV series Roots: The Next Generation (1978), Martin Luther King: The Dream and the Drum (1986) and The Stand (1994). Dee joined her husband in Do the Right Thing and Jungle Fever.

Davis was a longtime civil rights activist. He voiced the famous United Negro College Fund slogan, "A mind is a terrible thing to waste." He also offered noted eulogies at the funerals of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.

Becoming one of America's most recognizable character actors, Davis broke barriers for black performers in the movies, as well as on TV and the stage.

He appeared in such films as The Cardinal (1963), The Hill (1965), Grumpy Old Men (1993), The Client (1994) and I'm Not Rappaport (1996) -- the last being a repeat of his stage role a decade earlier.

His TV appearances included The Emperor Jones (1955), Freedom Road (1979), Miss Evers' Boys (1997) and Twelve Angry Men (1997). He was on the cast of The Defenders from 1963 to 1965.

Davis directed several films, the best-known being Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970) and Countdown at Kusini (1976), in which he appeared with Dee.

Actor Roy Scheider, who had performed with Davis and attended anti-war rallies with him, called Davis and his wife "the first political couple of America."

"Ossie seemed to always show up at the right time, on the right side, which was always the human side. He was always progressive and had a very heartfelt sympathy for all people everywhere," Scheider said.

Davis and his wife co-wrote the book With Ossie and Ruby: In This Life Together in the late 1990s. It told of their joint struggles against racial injustice, as well as their life as a couple. The couple, who had three children, wrote in the book about their decision to have an open marriage.

Filming began for Retirement this week. Davis, Peter Falk, George Segal and Rip Torn were cast as a quartet of grumpy old men who leave their Florida retirement homes on a Vegas road trip to stop the marriage of one of their daughters to the wrong man.