Saturday, March 31, 2007
7:00 PM
A Conversation with Ruby Dee
The Lyric Theater
819 NW 2nd Avenue
Please join us for a repeat performance with the esteemed actress and civil rights activist, Ruby Dee. Ms. Dee served as our guest of honor for our first festival last year, serves as our honorary chairperson and is gracing us with her legendary presence again this year.
RUBY DEE’S BIO
As the first African American woman to appear in major roles at the American Shakespeare Festival, Actor Ruby Dee calls herself a “word worker.” “Ideas too,” she says. “I love language and authors and music and how they can all interconnect. As an actor, I want to explore life and people rhythms and the sounds in the silences.”
Ms. Dee’s film career began in the 1950s, with the release of No Way Out and The Jackie Robinson Story. Since then, she has been featured in many other films, including St. Louis Blues, A Raisin in the Sun, The Balcony, The Incident, Buck and the Preacher, Cat People, Do The Right Thing, Jungle Fever, Just Cause, and Tuesday Morning Ride. Ms. Dee co-wrote the screenplay for and co-starred in Jules Dassin’s Up Tight, and co-produced the 1974 film Countdown at Kusini with her husband, Ossie Davis, and the Delta Sigma Theta sorority.
Ms. Dee made her Broadway debut in the non musical South Pacific and has appeared in such plays as Jeb, Anna Lucasta, A Raisin in the Sun, Purlie Victorious, and Checkmates. Off-Broadway, in 1970 she received an Obie Award for her performance in Boesman and Lena, and a Drama Desk Award for Wedding Band in 1974.
She has made many television appearances and received Emmy nominations for her performances in The Nurses, Roots: The Next Generation, Gore Vidal’s Lincoln, China Beach, and Evening Shade, as well as two Daytime Emmy nominations for her recurring role as Alice the Great on Bill Cosby’s animated series, Little Bill. In 1991, she was awarded the Emmy for her performance in Decoration Day.
Married for more than 50 years to the late Ossie Davis, their work together on the American social scene began with strident opposition to Sen. Joseph McCarthy's Communist witch-hunt in the 1950s and flowed into the civil rights movement a decade later. They served as masters of ceremonies for the 1963 March on Washington. They've sued in federal court to ensure black voting rights and they've been on the frontlines of latter-day efforts to protect equal rights for all.
Ms. Dee is also the author of two children’s books, Tower to Heaven and Two Ways to Count to Ten, and a book of poetry and short stories, My One Good Nerve, which she has adapted into a solo performance piece. In 1998, Ruby and Ossie authored their autobiography, With Ossie and Ruby: In This Life Together.
Ruby and Ossie were inducted into the NAACP Image Award Hall of Fame (1989), awarded the Silver Circle Award by the Academy of Television Arts and Science (1994), the National Medal of Arts Award (1995), and the Screen Actors Guild’s Lifetime Achievement Award (2001). In December 2004, Ms. Dee and Mr. Davis were recipients of the John F. Kennedy Center Honors.
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