When it comes to the enduring love of Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, death will not do them part.
The 91-year-old activist and actress, who died late Wednesday, will spend eternity with her late husband — their ashes co-mingled inside an urn bearing the words, “In This Thing Together.”
Dee, the epitome of grace, courage, style and class across seven decades of stardom, was flanked by two generations of family when she passed away at 10:30 p.m. in her suburban home.
“She very peacefully surrendered,” said her daughter Nora Day, standing Thursday on the back steps of her parents’ New Rochelle house. “We hugged her, we kissed her, we gave her our permission to go.
“She opened her eyes. She looked at us. She closed her eyes, and she set sail.”
The Cleveland-born, Harlem-raised Dee emerged in an era when African-American women remained second-class citizens on stage and screen.
She went on to earn an Emmy, a Grammy and a Screen Actors Guild Award, along with a 2008 Oscar nomination for playing the mother to Denzel Washington’s Harlem drug kingpin in “American Gangster.”
In 1965, she became the first African-American woman to perform a leading role at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Conn.
The lights on Broadway will dim for 60 seconds at 7:45 p.m. Friday in her honor.
“A TRUE APOLLO LEGEND RUBY DEE 1922-2014,” read the marquee above the Apollo Theater on 125th St. in Harlem.
Her career as an actress paralleled her work as an activist, often done with husband Davis at her side until his death in 2005.
She and Davis were close friends with both Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, whose eulogy Davis gave in 1965 — two years after Dee delivered a stirring reading at King’s March on Washington.
In 2005, Dee and Davis received the National Civil Rights Museum’s Lifetime Achievement Freedom award. Six years earlier, both were arrested while protesting the police shooting of unarmed immigrant Amadou Diallo.
The two starred side-by-side in a pair of Spike Lee-directed films, “Do The Right Thing” and “Jungle Fever.” In all, they performed together in 11 plays and five films.
Dee’s first film role came in 1949’s musical drama “That Man of Mine.” She played Rachel Robinson in “The Jackie Robinson Story” in 1950, and co-starred opposite Nat King Cole, Eartha Kitt and Cab Calloway in “St. Louis Blues” in1958.
She appeared in the 1979 TV movie “Roots: The Next Generations,” and co-starred with Davis in their own short-lived 1980-81 show, “Ossie and Ruby!”
Dee was a frequent presence on New York stages for four decades, joining the American Negro Theatre in 1941 and making her Broadway debut two years later in “South Pacific.”
She starred opposite Davis in the 1946 play “Jeb,” and the two were wed in 1948.
In 1959, Dee starred in the Broadway premiere of “A Raisin in the Sun” as the wife of Sidney Poitier — and she reprised the role in the film eight years later.
Dee’s last Broadway performance was in the 1988 comedy “Checkmates,” which marked the debut of Washington.
The Oscar-winning actor is on the boards in Poitier’s role in “A Raisin in the Sun.”
Dee’s résumé of activism included membership in organizations including the Congress of Racial Equality, the NAACP, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Though born Ruby Wallace, she kept her married surname even after divorcing her first husband, blues singer Frankie Dee, in the 1940s.
She and Davis collaborated for decades on art, activism and family. The duo has three children: blues musician Guy Davis, and two daughters, Nora Day and Hasna Muhammad.
All three, along with Dee’s seven grandchildren, were with the actress when she died.
“She’s off to her next gig,” said grandson Jihaad Muhammad, 32.
The couple raised eyebrows with an autobiography that advocated open marriage, saying that lies, not extramarital affairs, destroy marriages. The book was published in 1998, when the pair celebrated its 50th anniversary — a feat they self-deprecatingly credited “as much to luck as to love.”
A documentary on the couple’s trailblazing life and career, “Life’s Essentials with Ruby Dee,” debuts June 22 at the 18th Annual American Black Film Festival in Chelsea. It was directed by Dee and Davis’ grandson Muta’Ali.
With Nancy Dillon, Joe Neumaier, Simone Weichselbaum and Michael J. Feeney
