Ruby Dee, a Ringing Voice for Civil Rights, Onstage and Off, Dies at 91

Ruby Dee, a standout amongst the most continuing on-screen characters of theater and film, whose open profile and lobbyist energies made her, alongside her spouse, Ossie Davis, a heading backer for social equality both in the stage and in the more extensive world, kicked the bucket on Wednesday at her home in New Rochelle, N.y. She was 91.

Her little girl Nora Davis Day affirmed the demise.

A modest excellence with a feeling of industrious social trouble and an anxious, examining sagacity, Ms. Dee started her performing vocation in the 1940s, and it proceeded well into the 21st century. She was dependably a basic top choice, however not regularly give a role as a heading woman.

Her best focal part was Off Broadway, in the 1970 Athol Fugard show, "Boesman and Lena," around a couple of roaming blended race South Africans, for which she accepted overpowering commendation. Clive Barnes composed in The New York Times, "Ruby Dee as Lena is providing for one of the finest exhibitions I have ever seen."

Her most well known execution came more than 10 years prior, in 1959, in a supporting part in "A Raisin in the Sun," Lorraine Hansberry's milestone dramatization about the quotidian battle of a dark family in Chicago at the beginning of the social equality development. Ms. Dee played Ruth Younger, the wife of the principle character, Walter Lee Younger, played by Sidney Poitier, and the girl in-law of the heading female character, the family matron, Lena (Claudia Mcneil).

Ruth is a character with to an extreme degree excessively on her plate: a packed home, a grieved spouse, a youthful child, an oppressive relative, a wearying employment and an unwanted pregnancy, also the imparted trouble of dark individuals all around in a general public skewed against them. Ms. Dee's was a frequenting picture of an adolescent lady whose edginess to keep up effortlessness under weight doesn't keep her from being sporadically broken by it.

The play had 530 exhibitions on Broadway and was repeated, with a great part of the cast in place, as a 1961 film. On screen, Edith Oliver composed in The New Yorker, Ms. Dee was "considerably more amazing" than she was in front of an audience. "Is there a superior youthful on-screen character in America, or one who can make all that she does appear to be so smooth?" Ms. Oliver composed.

The dedicated yet stressed adored one was a part Ms. Dee played habitually, in movies like "The Jackie Robinson Story" (in which she played the wife of the spearheading dark ballplayer, who featured as himself) and "No possibility to get to," an intense racial show in which she played the sister of a jail specialist (Mr. Poitier).

Throughout the span of Ms. Dee's vocation, the lives of American blacks, both exceptional and normal, belatedly rose as rich topic for standard theater creations and movies, and dark entertainers went from being relegated to minor and frequently deprecating parts to featuring in Hollywood megahits.

Ms. Dee went from being a pupil of Paul Robeson to featuring with Mr. Poitier on Broadway. She was an emphasized player in the movies of Spike Lee and an Oscar chosen one for a supporting part in the 2007 motion picture "American Gangster," around a Harlem pill ruler (Denzel Washington); she played an adoring mother who deliberately ignored to her child's guiltiness.

Yet Ms. Dee not just partook in that development; through her perceivability in an extensive variety of ventures, from classics in front of an audience to contemporary film shows to TV cleanser musical dramas, she additionally helped achieve it.

In 1965, playing Cordelia in "Lord Lear" and Kate in "The Taming of the Shrew," she was the first dark lady to show up in significant parts at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Conn. In 1968, she turned into the first dark on-screen character to be emphasized normally on the titillating prime-time TV arrangement "Peyton Place."

She showed up in two of Mr. Lee's most punctual movies, "Make the best choice" and "Wilderness Fever." (On Thursday, Michelle Obama tweeted about Ms. Dee: "I'll always remember seeing her in 'Make the best decision' on my first date with Barack.")

Ms. Dee picketed Broadway theaters that were not utilizing dark on-screen characters for their shows and stood up against film groups that contracted few or no blacks.

Having made her name in movies that tended to racial issues, she started searching out a greater amount of them. She worked together with the executive Jules Dassin on the screenplay for "Up Tight!," a 1968 adjustment of "The Informer," Liam O'flaherty's 1925 novel set after the Irish civil war. (It had likewise been shot by John Ford.) Mr. Dassin and Ms. Dee moved the story of disloyalty among progressives to 1960s Cleveland; Ms. Dee played a welfare mother who helped food her family by falling back on prostitution.

She likewise loaned her voice and vicinity to the reason for racial correspondence outside the big time. She was a dynamic part of the Congress of Racial Equality, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

At the Tony Awards service on Sunday, Audra Mcdonald, in tolerating her sixth acting recompense for her depiction of Billie Holiday in "Woman Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill," recognized Ms. Dee as one of five dark ladies whose shoulders she remains upon. (The others were Holiday, Maya Angelou, Diahann Carroll and Lena Horne.)

A restoration of "Raisin in the Sun," now playing at the Ethel Barrymore Theater on Broadway, the same stage as the first creation, won three Tonys, including one for Sophie Okonedo, who plays Ruth Younger. In an announcement, Ms. Okonedo called Ms. Dee "one of my courageous women."

Ruby Ann Wallace, as she was known when she was conceived in Cleveland on Oct. 27, 1922, experienced childhood in Harlem. The third offspring of high school folks, she was raised basically by her father, Marshall Wallace, who turned into a server on the Pennsylvania Railroad, and his second wife, the previous Emma Amelia Benson, a school instructed instructor who was 13 years more established than he. Ms. Dee depicted her as a strict yet cherishing mother, a stickler for statement and the individual who acquainted her with verse, music and move.

By the mid-1940s, when she moved on from Hunter College, Ms. Dee was at that point a working on-screen character, having showed up on Broadway and in preparations of the American Negro Theater, then a youngster expert organization housed in the cellar of the Harlem extension of the New York Public Library.

She had likewise been hitched, in 1941, to the artist Frankie Dee Brown. The marriage broke down inside four years, however it gave Ms. Dee the name by which she would be known for whatever remains of her life.

She made her Broadway make a big appearance in December 1943 in a fleeting play called "South Pacific," unnecessary to the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical that tagged along more than five years after the fact. In 1946 she joined the cast of a Broadway-bound play called "Jeb," around a dark trooper who has lost a leg in World War II and runs across that his offering for his nation is of little esteem even with the prejudice he experiences on his return home.

Employed as the understudy for the part of Libby, the title character's adoring better half, Ms. Dee not just supplanted the first performing artist in the part before premiere night additionally went gaga for the star, Ossie Davis. The show kept up for nine exhibitions, the relationship almost 60 years, until Mr. Davis' passing in 2005. They wedded in 1948.

Other than her little girl Nora, Ms. Dee is made due by an alternate girl, Hasna Muhammad; a child, the vocalist Guy Davis; a sister, Angelina Roach; and seven grandchildren.

The association between Ms. Dee and Mr. Davis was sentimental, familial, proficient, imaginative and political, and they together gained the National Medal of Arts from President Bill Clinton.

Throughout their vocations they performed together commonly, incorporating in "Raisin," when Mr. Davis assumed control over the stage part of Walter Younger from Mr. Poitier, and in "Purlie Victorious," Mr. Davis' own particular wide parody around an alluring minister in the Jim Crow South, on Broadway in 1961 and in the 1963 film rendition, "Gone Are the Days!"

In 1998 they distributed a joint personal history, "With Ossie & Ruby: In This Life Together," to remember their 50th wedding commemoration. The book is amazing for its sincerity about their professions and childhoods as well as about their cozy lives, together and separated, and their appearance on race relations, legislative issues and workmanship. Told in discrete, exchanging voices, it was a book-length open discussion that vouched for a long lasting private one.

Ms. Dee and Mr. Davis stood together, far to the political left, for the benefit of various reasons. They stood up in the 1950s against the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and against the oppression of American Communists (and implied Communists) in the examinations by Senator Joseph Mccarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. At the point when, under the Mccarran Internal Security Act, the administration repudiated the identification of Robeson, the extraordinary dark on-screen character, vocalist and straightforward communist, they helped arrange the battle to have it restored.

They were companions and supporters of both the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. furthermore Malcolm X, whose tribute, after his death in 1965, was conveyed by Mr. Davis. On Aug. 28, 1963, the day of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which reached a state of perfection in Dr. Lord's "I Have a Dream" discourse, Ms. Dee and Mr. Davis were the M.c's. of the diversion occasion at the foot of the Washington Monument that went before the walk to the Lincoln Memorial. They raised cash for the Black Panthers. They exhibited against the Vietnam War.

In 2005 Ms. Dee gained a lifetime accomplishment recompense from the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis.

"You can just acknowledge flexibility," she said then, "when you end up in a position to battle for another person opportunity and not stress over your own."