Ossie Davis & Ruby Dee

Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee. 1917 - 2005 , 1922 - 2014. , Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee met in 1946 when they co-starred in the Broadway play Jeb. While the play lasted six months, their marriage in 1948 lasted 56 years. In their joint autobiography, With Ossie and Ruby: In This Life Together, they write that their marriage "almost felt like an appointment we were finally got around to keeping.", They have 10 Emmy nominations between them, and have appeared together in productions such as A Raisin in the Sun, Roots: The Next Generation and Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing and Malcolm X in which Davis reenacted the real-life eulogy he had given for the fallen civil rights leader., Davis wrote the Broadway satire Purlie Victorious and co-wrote and directed the film Cotton Comes to Harlem. He collaborated with Dee on the PBS series With Ossie and Ruby and co-wrote the award-winning teleplay For Us The Living: The Story of Medgar Evers. His comedic roles include appearances in Dr. Dolittle and Grumpy Old Men., Dee first attracted national recognition for her role in the 1950 movie The Jackie Robinson Story. She won the Emmy as best actress for the 1991 Hallmark Hall of Fame production Decoration Day and was the first black woman to play lead roles at the American Shakespeare Festival., Davis and Dee were activists who used their celebrity status as actors to help promote the cause of African Americans and other minorities. They were at the forefront of many civil rights, justice, labor and anti-war struggles and were the masters-of-ceremony for the March on Washington., Davis was born Raiford Cahtman Davis in Cogdell, Georgia in 1917, and Dee was born Ruby Ann Wallace in Cleveland, Ohio in 1922. They moved to New Rochelle in 1963 and lived not far from where Thomas Paine, another New Rochelle activist once lived. In his acceptance speech for the Yitzhak Rabin Peacemaker Award Davis said, "I owe so much to the great people here in New Rochelle. We are fellow workers in the vineyard. New Rochelle is my Jerusalem.", In memory of their many contributions to the community, the theater at the New Rochelle Public Library was named for Ossie Davis and the park at Library Green was named for Ruby Dee. They have been honored with the National Medal for the Arts in 1995, the Screen Actor's Guild Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2004 and the NAACP Image Award in 1989.