She won the Emmy, Obie, Drama Desk, Screen Actors' Guild, SAG Lifetime Achievement and Kennedy Center Honors Awards. Out of her hundreds of performances from Cordelia in LEAR to Kate in SHREW to her Oscar nominated role at the age of 83 no less in AMERICAN GANGSTA, it is perhaps her legendary performance in A RAISIN IN THE SUN that is burnished in my brain whenever I invoke her name, that, and her epic relationship with fellow actor, poet, playwright, activist Ossie Davis. They did it all. Friends of both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, they were at the very center of America's civil rights movement and did much to develop America's conscience through their own metier in the arts.
She was a NYC actress, through and through.
I remember her popping on to the big screen in Spike Lee''s DO THE RIGHT THING and thinking her breathtaking beauty was an inside job that radiated out of her and that we need not butcher ourselves with plastic surgery, but yield with grace to time the way she did. She taught us how to grow up by growing old like a good wine or a priceless violin.
We lost her at 91, a grand life, well lived, but it is raining outside early this morning in midtown Manhattan and that is exactly how I feel as I ruminate the loss.
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