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Ossie Davis 1917 - 2005

Ossie Davis of New Rochelle, Westchester County, NY was born on December 18, 1917 in Cogdell, Clinch County, Georgia United States, and died at age 87 years old on February 4, 2005 in Miami Beach, Miami-Dade County, FL.

Ossie Davis

Raiford Chatman Davis

New Rochelle, Westchester County, NY 10802

December 18, 1917

Cogdell, Clinch County, Georgia, 31634, United States

February 4, 2005

Miami Beach, Miami-Dade County, Florida, United States

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Ossie Davis Ossie Davis (1917 - 2005)

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Ossie Davis' History: 1917 - 2005

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Introduction

Ossie Davis Born December 18, 1917 in Cogdell, Georgia, USA Died February 4, 2005 in Miami Beach, Florida, USA (natural causes) Birth Name Raiford Chatman Davis Height 6' 2¼" (1.89 m) Ossie Davis was born on December 18, 1917 in Cogdell, Georgia, USA as Raiford Chatman Davis. He was an actor and writer, known for Do the Right Thing (1989), Bubba Ho-Tep (2002) and The Client (1994). He was married to Ruby Dee. He died on February 4, 2005 in Miami Beach, Florida, USA. Spouse (1) Ruby Dee (9 December 1948 - 4 February 2005) ( his death) ( 3 children) Trade Mark (1) Deep commanding voice Named to NAACP Image Awards Hall of Fame with his wife, Ruby Dee, in 1989. The county clerk misunderstood his mother's dialectal pronunciation of his initials "R.C." when he was born. He thought he heard "Ossie" and registered him as such. The name stuck. Was a featured speaker at the funeral of both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Lived in New Rochelle, New York. Recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors in 2004, along with Elton John, Joan Sutherland, John Williams, Warren Beatty and wife Ruby Dee. Had three children his with Ruby Dee: Guy Davis, Nora Day, and Hasna Muhammad. Was the oldest of five children. His brother, Dr. William Davis, a professor in San Antonio, TX, holds several patents, one of which is for the chemical process to produce instant mashed potatoes. Twice nominated for Broadway's Tony Award: in 1958 as Best Supporting or Featured Actor (Musical) for "Jamaica", and in 1970 as co-author of the book for Best Musical nominee "Purlie". Member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Actors Branch). He and his wife Ruby Dee were awarded the American National Medal of the Arts in 1995 by the National Endowment of the Arts in Washington, D.C. Had played the father of Jennifer Beals' character on The L Word (2004). In a powerful performance, fitting of his legacy, his character died in the episode, The L Word: L-Chaim (2005). This was his final performance before his own death, and the episode was dedicated to his memory. Biography in: "The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives". Volume 7, 2003-2005, pages 128-130. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2007. Broadway debut as playwright with "Purlie Victorious" in 1961. Studied drama with the Rose McClendon Players in Harlem, New York City. Served in the United States Army during World War II as a medical technician. Had appeared with his wife Ruby Dee in nine films: No Way Out (1950), Gone Are the Days! (1963), The Sheriff (1971), Cool Red (1976), Roots: The Next Generations (1979), All God's Children (1980), Do the Right Thing (1989), Jungle Fever (1991) and The Stand (1994). Grandfather of Muta'Ali Muhammad. Sang with the Melloharps, a vocal group, who had "I Love Only You" on Tin Pan Alley 145 in 1955. His ashes are inurned at Ferncliff Cemetery and Mausoleum in Hartsdale, New York. He was a lifelong liberal Democrat. Personal Quotes (4) College ain't so much where you been as how you talk when you get back. Struggle is strengthening. Battling with evil gives us the power to battle evil even more. Any form of art is a form of power; it has impact, it can affect change--it can not only move us, it makes us move. I find, in being black, a thing of beauty: a joy; a strength; a secret cup of gladness.
12/18

1917

Birthday

December 18, 1917

Birthdate

Cogdell, Clinch County, Georgia 31634, United States

Birthplace

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02/4

2005

Death

February 4, 2005

Death date

Natural Causes

Cause of death

Miami Beach, Miami-Dade County, Florida United States
Death location

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Obituary

Ossie Davis, Actor, Writer and Eloquent Champion of Racial Justice, Dies at 87 By Richard Severo and Douglas Martin Feb. 5, 2005 Ossie Davis, the imposing, deep-voiced actor who with his wife and acting partner, Ruby Dee, helped widen horizons for blacks on stage and screen while fighting zealously for civil rights from Washington to Hollywood, died yesterday in Miami. He was 87. His son, Guy, said Mr. Davis was found dead at a hotel. He said that the cause had not been determined, but that his father had a history of heart problems and had recently recovered from pneumonia. Mr. Davis initially intended to be a writer, but his fame came from his incisive and wide-ranging acting performances over five decades, even as he wrote plays and screenplays and directed and produced in both media. So many of his performances were with Ms. Dee -- 11 stage productions and five movies during long parallel careers -- that the two have been compared with the Lunts or Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy. Together they helped pave the road for two generations of black performers, Sean Combs said when the couple was honored at the Kennedy Center in December. Mr. Davis replied: "We knew that every time we got a job and every time we were onstage, America was looking to make judgments about all black folks on the basis of how you looked, how you sounded, how you carried yourself. So any role you had was a role that was involved in the struggle for black identification. You couldn't escape it." Lloyd Richards, who directed plays involving both actors from their earliest days in New York, said in an interview yesterday that they were part of a large evolution by blacks from the roles of "maids, butlers or some such" to considerably more varied fare. "You could not be exposed to Ossie and not be affected by him," Mr. Richards said. Last night, before curtains rose at 8, Broadway theaters dimmed their lights in Mr. Davis's honor. Mr. Davis and Ms. Dee first performed together in the plays "Jeb" in 1946, and "Anna Lucasta" in 1946-47; Mr. Davis's first film, "No Way Out," in 1950, was Ms. Dee's fifth. Both had significant roles on television in "Roots: The Next Generation" (1978), "Martin Luther King: The Dream and the Drum" (1986) and "The Stand" (1994). The two also fought in broader arenas. They helped organize the 1963 March on Washington and were master and mistress of ceremonies. At a news conference in Manhattan yesterday, Harry Belafonte, with tears in his eyes, compared Mr. Davis to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. DuBois and Fanny Lou Hamer, all of whom were Mr. Davis's friends. In particular, Mr. Davis remained fiercely loyal to Robeson even as he was denounced by other show-business figures for his openly Communist sympathies. In 1965, Mr. Davis delivered the eulogy at the funeral of Malcolm X, calling him "our shining black prince," and he spoke it again in a voiceover for the 1992 Spike Lee film, "Malcolm X." In 1968, he eulogized Dr. King. It was partly through Spike Lee movies that Mr. Davis and Ms. Dee became known to a new generation. Mr. Davis appeared in Mr. Lee's "School Daze," "Do the Right Thing" and "Jungle Fever." Ms. Dee appeared in the latter two. Early in their careers, Mr. Davis co-starred with Ms. Dee when, on Aug. 31, 1959, he took over from Sidney Poitier the role of Walter Lee in "A Raisin in the Sun, " the hit drama about the aspirations of a black family. (Ms. Dee created the role of his wife, Ruth.) It was written by Lorraine Hansberry and directed by Mr. Richards, and is often seen as a milestone in drama by and about blacks. Mr. Davis never stopped working, his son recalled, adding that he used his waiting time on the set to write plays on his laptop computer. In 1996, he recreated a 1986-87 stage role in the movie "I'm Not Rappaport," and in 1997 he appeared on television in "Miss Evers' Boys" and "Twelve Angry Men." Raiford Chatman Davis was born on Dec. 18, 1917, in Cogdell, Ga. He was the oldest of five children of Kince Charles Davis and the former Laura Cooper. He became Ossie when his mother told the courthouse clerk in Clinch River, Ga., who was filing his birth certificate that his name was "R.C. Davis." The clerk thought she had said, "Ossie Davis," and she was not about to argue with a white person. He grew up in Waycross, Ga., where one of his earliest memories was bigots' harassing his father because his occupation was considered a bit sophisticated for blacks at that time. His father planned and supervised the building of railroads. A member of the Ku Klux Klan threatened to shoot his father "like a dog." Ossie said that thinking about this inspired him to become a writer. Despite this early consciousness of racism, Mr. Davis remarked in his adulthood that his favorite movie actor as a child was Tom Mix, the cowboy star, who was white. A happy memory was growing up in a family of preachers and storytellers, and he said that early on he learned to think of the church as theater. During the Depression his father lost his job and eked out a living selling homemade herbal medicines. Ossie found solace from poverty in school, where he developed a passion for reading Shakespeare. In 1935, after his high school graduation, Mr. Davis set off to hitchhike from Waycross to Washington, where he stayed with his mother's two sisters; his mother had sewed a $10 bill into his underwear. With the aid of a National Youth Administration Scholarship and a library job, he entered Howard University, where he encountered the likes of Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen in a course on black literature. He fell under the wing of Dr. Alain Locke, a philosophy professor whom American Visions magazine in 1992 called "midwife to a generation of younger artists, writers and poets." Dr. Locke urged Mr. Davis to learn more about the theater. The student acted on his advice, perhaps more hastily than the professor had intended him to. He dropped out of Howard at the end of his junior year and moved to New York. He later said that he believed college was a place to "learn to spell and where the commas go," and that since he had mastered those things, there was no reason to remain. He joined the Rose McClendon Players, a little theater group in Harlem, in order to learn more about plays, which he hoped to write himself. He swept floors, painted sets and sometimes acted in plays performed in church basements and union halls. He was occasionally reduced to sleeping on a park bench, but he mingled with the intellectual giants of black America, including Richard Wright, DuBois and A. Philip Randolph. While still in high school, Mr. Davis had dreamed of joining Ethiopia's struggle against Mussolini, although he confessed he was not sure where Ethiopia was. He had a brief flirtation with the Young Communist League, which he said ended when he was drafted into the Army in 1942. He spent much of World War II as a surgical technician in an Army hospital in Liberia, where he served both troops and local inhabitants. After his discharge in 1945, Mr. Davis returned to Georgia but was soon approached by Richard Campbell, who urged Mr. Davis to audition for the title role in "Jeb," a play about a Purple Heart winner who returned to Louisiana and is thwarted by racism in his efforts to find work. The play ran less than two weeks on Broadway, but critics were impressed with Mr. Davis. More importantly, the young actress playing the female lead could not get the Southern accent right. So the understudy, who knew all the lines, Ruby Dee, took over. She and Mr. Davis had previously appeared in different productions of the same play, "On Strivers Row," in 1940, but had never met. Ms. Dee said in an interview with CBS News last year that her first impression was that Mr. Davis was "a country bumpkin." But it was the beginning of a spectacular personal and professional collaboration. In December 1948, they took the day off from rehearsals for another play, "The Smile of the World," and rode a bus to New Jersey to be married. In addition to his wife and his son, Guy, of the Bronx, Mr. Davis is survived by his daughters, Nora Day of Montclair, N.J., and Hasna Muhammad of Brewster, N.Y.; a brother, William, of San Antonio; and seven grandchildren. One of Mr. Davis's best-known works was "Purlie Victorious," which used comical stereotypes to make stinging points abut racism. Mr. Davis wrote the play and played the title character, a preacher trying to open an integrated church in an old barn. In 1999, the reference book Contemporary Southern Writers said it offered "a brilliant exploration of how archetypes and stereotypes can be overstated to the point of absurdity." Mr. Davis repeated his role in the 1963 film version, titled "Gone Are the Days." It was at first unsuccessful at the box office, but it was re-released with the title of the play under the sponsorship of Paul Newman, Fredric March and other celebrities. In 1970, "Purlie" was made into a hit musical, propelled in part by Melba Moore's performance and a strong score. From March 31 to April 3, the musical version will be staged in concert as part of the "Encores!" series at City Center in Manhattan. What may be have been Mr. Davis's last interview will be broadcast on Feb. 21, the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X, on "Tavis Smiley," the PBS show. Mr. Smiley asked Mr. Davis how he had prepared himself to deliver eulogies for Malcolm X and for Dr. King. He answered, "The first thing, I should think, would be to sit quietly for as long as it takes and think long thoughts about the subject."Ossie Davis died on February 4, 2005 in Miami Beach, Florida at age 87. He was born on December 18, 1917 in Cogdell, Georgia. We know that Ossie Davis had been residing in New Rochelle, Westchester County, New York 10802.

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Ossie Davis lived 16 years longer than the average family member when died at the age of 87.

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