Ruby Dee

Ruby Ann Wallace was born on the twenty-seventh of October 1922 at Cleveland, Ohio, the third of four children of Marshall Edward Nathaniel Wallace — a porter on the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad — and Gladys Hightower Wallace, a schoolteacher. The family moved to Harlem when she was an infant. She was educated at the Hunter College High School of Manhattan and at Hunter College, completing the bachelor's in 1945.

She began acting professionally in the Harlem-based American Negro Theatre while still at Hunter — alongside Ossie Davis (placed in this archive), whom she met at the 1946 auditions for Robert Ardrey's Jeb and married in 1948. She studied subsequently at the Actors Studio under Lloyd Richards and Morris Carnovsky.

She made her Broadway debut in 1946 in Jeb and made her film debut in The Jackie Robinson Story of 1950, playing Rachel Robinson opposite Jackie Robinson (placed in this archive) himself. She played Ruth Younger opposite Sidney Poitier (placed in this archive) in the original 1959 Broadway production of A Raisin in the Sun and the 1961 film. In 1965 she became the first African American actress to play a major non-domestic role at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival of Canada, appearing as Kate in The Taming of the Shrew and Cordelia in King Lear opposite Hume Cronyn. She returned in 1967 to play Cassandra in the Festival's Troilus and Cressida.

She received the 1991 Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Miniseries for Decoration Day, the 2007 Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in American Gangster, and the 2008 Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for the same role at eighty-five. She received the National Medal of Arts in 1995 and the Kennedy Center Honors in 2004 alongside Ossie Davis.

She sustained across her fifty-six-year marriage to Davis a parallel public career as a civil-rights orator and writer. Her four published volumes — Two Ways to Count to Ten, Glow Child, My One Good Nerve and With Ossie and Ruby: In This Life Together — established her as one of the principal poetic voices of the post-war Black theatre.

She died at her home at New Rochelle, New York, on the eleventh of June 2014, at ninety-one.

She is honored here as the matriarch of the American Negro stage.