The actor and civil rights activist Ruby Dee, who has died aged 91, played an important part in the struggle for equality for African Americans, both inside and outside show business. She first made an impression in A Raisin in the Sun (1959), Lorraine Hansberry's groundbreaking Broadway drama, which coincided with the rise of the American civil rights movement. In the play, about a down-at-heel black family seeking a better life in a segregated section of Chicago, Dee played Ruth Younger, Sidney Poitier's level-headed, long-suffering wife. She repeated the role in the film version two years later, for which she won the National Board of Review award for best supporting actress.
It had taken her over 20 years in theatre and films to gain such recognition. From the early 1940s, Dee had appeared in productions of the American Negro Theatre (ANT), other members of which were Poitier, Harry Belafonte and Ossie Davis, whom Dee was to marry in 1948. It was an ANT production of Philip Yordan's all-black play Anna Lucasta, in which she starred on Broadway (taking over from Hilda Simms) in 1944.
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