Ruby Dee
Born: October 27 1924
Where: Cleveland, Ohio, USA
The actress is best known internationally for her Oscar-nominated turn as Denzel Washington's supportive mother Mama Lucas in American Gangster.
Offscreen, she is famous in the US for her civil rights activism as a poet, playwright and screenwriter.
She and her late husband, the actor Ossie Davis, could count Martin Luther King and Malcolm X among their friends.
A favourite actress of controversial director Spike Lee, she has also appeared in movies ranging from Jungle Fever and Do The Right Thing to the thriller No Way Out.
The daughter of a cook and waiter, she was raised by a schoolteacher stepmum after her natural mother left the family and her father remarried.
She grew up in Harlem, New York and graduated in 1945 from Hunter College with degrees in French and Spanish.
At 17 she married for the first time to Frankie Dee Brown, a midget. The couple divorced after four years.
She made several appearances on Broadway before receiving national recognition for her role in the 1950 film The Jackie Robinson Story.
Her career has seen appearances on film, TV and radio including the movie A Raisin in the Sun, in which she recreated her stage role as a suffering working class housewife opposite Sidney Poitier.
Specialising in heavily politicised roles, her appearances also included the Sixties outings Gone Are the Days and The Incident, which is now recognized as helping pave the way for young African-American actors and filmmakers.
Subsequent big screen outings include the 1982 Paul Shrader thriller Cat People and the role of Mother Sister in Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing in 1989.
Two years later she appeared in Lee's Jungle Fever before largely restricting her appearances to TV and the stage.
She has been nominated for eight Emmy Awards, winning twice: once for her role in the 1990 TV film Decoration Day, and again for her television guest appearance in the China Beach episode Skylark.
Recently, she has been seen in the US TV series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.
Her nomination for Ridley Scott's American Gangster made her - at 83 - the second oldest star for best supporting actress behind Gloria Stuart (who was 87 for Titanic).
