News

We've lost another showbiz legend.

Ruby Dee photographed by Carl Van Vechten in 1962

Ruby Dee, the showbiz legend and awards magnet -- the list is seriously long and includes an Emmy & Grammy -- rose to fame on stage and screen in the 1940s. Her feature debut was That Man of Mine (1946) but her best remembered roles came later with The Jackie Robinson Story (1950), the screen adaptation of the oft-revived play A Raisin in the Sun (1961, which just netted yet more Tony Awards) opposite Sidney Poitier, and the first Off Broadway production of "Boesman and Lena" with James Earl Jones on stage in 1970.

Ruby Dee during her victory lap of events honoring her in the Aughts. This one is from 2008Younger audiences undoubtedly know her best from her screen return in the classic Do The Right Thing (1989, with her longtime husband Ossie Davie who passed away nine years ago), her political activism,...

Ruby Dee, an acclaimed actor and civil rights activist whose versatile career spanned stage, radio, television and film, has died at age 91, according to her daughter. Nora Davis Day told the Associated Press on Thursday that her mother died at home in New Rochelle, New York, on Wednesday night. Dee, who frequently acted alongside her husband of 56 years, Ossie Davis, was surrounded by family and friends, she added. Dee's long career brought her an Oscar nomination at age 83 for best supporting actress for her role in the 2007 film American Gangster. She also won an Emmy and was nominated for several others.

South African actor who helped break the taboos of apartheid

On a steamy evening in a rundown Johannesburg club in September 1961, two actors premiered The Blood Knot, a play about brothers with different fathers, both men black but one light enough to enter white society. For each of them, the black actor Zakes Mokae, who has died aged 75, and the white playwright Athol Fugard, the night launched their careers. Fugard's play toured South Africa for six months, and although he travelled first-class on the train while Mokae travelled third, the two had broken a taboo by being the first black and white actors to appear on a public stage in apartheid South Africa. The success of The Blood Knot brought Fugard to international attention and kickstarted Mokae's long and varied career in theatre, film and television.

Mokae was born and grew up in Sophiatown, Johannesburg, the son of a policeman and a housemaid.

Long Wharf Theatre Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein will be lecturing about Athol Fugard, described by the New York Times as "the greatest playwright writing in English since Shakespeare," Sunday, November 15 from 5 to 6 p.m. at the Willoughby Wallace Memorial Library, 146 Thimble Island Road, Stony Creek.

Edelstein is directing the world premiere of Fugard's Have You Seen Us?, running from Nov. 24 through Dec. 20 at Long Wharf Theatre, the site of many of Fugard's world premieres in the 1970s.

Fugard, born in 1932 in Middelburg, in the Karoo desert region of South Africa, battled to bring the stories of all South Africans to the world, even under the darkest years of apartheid, that abusive system that had one set of laws for whites, and another for people of color. For his service, he was awarded South Africa's highest award, the Ikhamanga Medal in 2005. His best-known plays include Bloodknot (1961); Boesman and Lena (1969); Sizwe Bansi...