Emmy and Tony Award-winning actress Mary Alice plays her role in Hollywood blockbusters (“The Matrix Revolutions”), television sitcom (“Another World”), and Broadway theater (“Fence”). Brought delicate elegance and quiet dignity to the. ”), Died Wednesday at her house in Manhattan. She was 85 years old, according to the New York Police Department.
Detective Anthony Passaro, a police spokesman, said police officers answered the 911 phone call and noticed that Alice was unresponsive.
Alice, a former Chicago school teacher, has appeared on nearly 60 television shows and movies. In 2000 she took office Theater Hall of Fame..
She first received widespread attention in 1987 with August Wilson’s “Fence” production on Broadway. She won a Tony Award as the most notable actress who played her housewife Rose Maxon in the 1950s. James Earl Jones (who also won a Tony Award) went through a promising career as a baseball player and became angry and harsh as a garbage carrier.
“MS. Alice’s performance emphasizes strength over self-pity and is more angry than aggravating bitterness,” Frank Lich wrote in a New York Times review. “The actress finds a spiritual quotient in her acceptance with Rose’s love for a hurt, very complex man.”
Its role is based on the memories of mothers, aunts, grandmothers, “women who were uneducated and lived before the liberation of women, and their identities were tied to their husbands.” I got a deep response from Alice who went to. “She said in an interview with the Times of the same year.
“I wanted to know about the world very early on, not so much that I didn’t want to get married,” she added. “I did it through college, through learning, through books and travel.”
Mary Alice was born on December 3, 1936 in Indianola, Mississippi, as one of three children, Sam Smith and Ozeler (Janakin) Smith. When she was young, her family moved to Chicago. There they lived in a house on the Near North Side and were later demolished for the Cabrini-Green Housing Project.
A direct family cannot survive.
She saw education as a path to a stable middle-class life and graduated from Chicago State University (now Chicago State University) in 1965 and took up a teaching profession at a public elementary school.
Still, she was aiming for an actress. “It was escapism,” she told the Chicago Tribune in 1986, she added: But my parents got up before the sun rose and worked all day. My father was tired. Her mother had to cook. Those people on the screen didn’t have to work when I went to the movies. “
Alice, who moved to New York City after deleting the name “Smith” in 1967, Negro Ensemble Company, We landed in an advanced acting class taught by Lloyd Richards, artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theater, who continued to oversee “Fence.”
From the 1970s to the early 80s, she made numerous appearances on sitcoms such as “Good Times” and “Sanford and Son,” and made her presence in the film with the 1976 Supremes-based musical “Sparkle.” Shown. “Beat Street” A 1984 breakin’s movie that helped bring hip-hop culture to the mainstream.
She produced the 1980 Off-Broadway “Zuman and Sign” featuring Francis Foster and Giancarlo Esposito, and the 1983 Ale Rep’s “Hay of the Sun” featuring Delroy Lindo. Won stage praise in production.
After her success in “Fences,” she played Lettie Bostic, a resident director of a historically black college with an intriguing past, in “A Different World,” a spin-off of “The Cosby Show.” A year later, she was praised as the mother of Oprah Winfrey’s maternal character in the television miniseries “Women in Brewster Place,” based on Gloria Naylor’s novel about a group of women living in a devastated housing project. I did.
By the 1990s, she had become a familiar face in movies. She played a role in “To Sleep With Anger” featuring Danny Glover of Charles Burnett and “Awakenings” of Penny Marshall featuring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro in 1990. Two years later, Denzel Washington became the title role for Spike Lee’s Malcolm X.
She also starred in “Bonfire of the Vanities” as the mother of a teenager who was hit by a car in a hit-and-run accident.
In 1992, she stood out in the drama series for her role in the 1950s series “I’ll Fly Away,” starring Sam Waterston and Regina Taylor, set in a fictional southern town. He was nominated for an Emmy Award as a supporting actress. She won the award for the same role the following year.
Alice was about to take another Tony home in 1995. She was written on “Having Our Say” with Emily Mann’s Broadway Amy Hill Hearth, Sarah (Sadie) L. A 1994 best-selling memoir by Delaney and her sister Annie Elizabeth (Bessie) Delaney.
Alice continued acting until 2005, when she replaced Gloria Foster as Oracle in the third installment of the 2003 Matrix movie series, starring in the 1970s Kojak TV restart.
“Acting was a big sacrifice,” she told Tribune in 1986. “If I had been a teacher, I might think I was already retired. My income would have been constant, but I didn’t feel about teaching how to act. That’s my life. It ’s my service. I ’m supposed to use it. ”
