Award-winning actress, author, and activist Ruby Dee, pictured, will be the recipient of the "Gordon Parks Choice of Weapons Award" at a tribute dinner on October 8, 2010, during the 7th annual Gordon Parks Celebration of Culture and Diversity. The full celebration will take place from October 6-9 at the Gordon Parks Museum/Center on the campus of Fort Scott (KS) Community College. The event was begun in 2004 to honor Fort Scott native Gordon Parks, noted photographer, writer, musician, and filmmaker. The award was established a year later in Parks' honor to pay tribute to a recipient who has excelled in the areas that Parks did and who exemplifies his spirit and strength of character.
Dee considers herself a product of Harlem, where she grew up and began her career as a member of the American Negro Theatre. She received her B.A. from Hunter College, and later studied acting with Paul Mann, Lloyd Richards and Morris Carnovsky.
Some of her favorite roles on stage and screen include Lutiebelle in Purlie Victorious (written by her late husband, Ossie Davis); Ruth in A Raisin in the Sun; Lena in Boesman and Lena, for which she received an Obie and a Drama Desk award; and Mary Tyrone in A Long Day's Journey Into Night, for which she received a Cable ACE award. She has received several Emmy nominations, and in 1991, won for her performance in Decoration Day.
Dee in 1988 was inducted into the Theatre Hall of fame. Together with her husband she was inducted into the NAACP Image Award Hall of Fame and awarded the Silver Circle Award by the Academy of Television Arts and Science, the National Medal of Arts Award, the Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award and the John F. Kennedy Center Honors.
In 2005, she starred in Naming Number 2, a New Zealand comedy-drama which won the Audience Award at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival and for which she was awarded New Zealand's highest acting honors. She is co-starred with Julie Harris in The Way Back Home and played Nanny in the Oprah Winfrey backed production of Their Eyes Were Watching God starring Halle Berry. Her most recent roles have been in American Gangster with Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe, in Steam with Ally Sheedy and in the independent film All About Us.
Dee released the selected speeches and writings of her husband in Life Lit by Some Large Vision in 2006. She is also the author of two children's books, a book of poetry and short stories, and a joint autobiography co-authored with her husband that received a Grammy Award in the spoken word category.
Previous honorees were actor and musician Avery Brooks; photographer Howard L. Bingham; Elizabeth Eckford and Ernest Green; two of the "Little Rock Nine"; Richard Roundtree, star of the Parks-directed film, Shaft and Nichelle Nichols of Star Trek fame.
Tickets for Gordon Parks Celebration events will go on sale in mid-September. For more information contact the center at (620) 223-2700, ext. 515. The Gordon Parks Center is funded in part from the Kansas Arts Commission, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.
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