If Dee is a has-been, the news certainly hasn’t traveled to Harlem, where she’s treated like royalty. When she saunters into the dining room of the soul-food eatery Sylvia’s, the patrons erupt into a squealing, standing ovation and huddle in for photos. It’s the perfect place for Dee to reflect on her life and career. Not because of the food—you can’t stay that svelte at 83 by eating smothered pork chops—but because, like Sylvia’s, Dee is a Harlem fixture. She was raised in Harlem from infancy, and has an abiding love for the historic enclave. “This place has informed so much of my experience,” she says. “If I wasn’t from Harlem, who would I be?”
It is this bone-deep connection with the rhythms and tempos of Harlem that gave Dee’s performance in “Gangster” its intense fidelity. She plays Mama Lucas, mother to Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington), the shrewd, ruthless businessman whose heroin enterprise rose to prominence in 1960s Harlem. “I understand women like Mama Lucas,” she says. “I knew these women, and as a mother I can empathize with the dread a woman would feel knowing her child has turned out this way.” She owes her Oscar nomination to one ferocious scene in which Mama Lucas confronts her wayward son about his life of crime. The way she demands honesty from Lucas is so withering, Dee effectively forces Washington, perhaps for the first time, to experience life as a toothpick.
By reaching back into her formative years to create that lived-in performance, Dee now has the opportunity to add yet another chapter to her long career. Her Academy Award nod for best supporting actress makes her the oldest nominee this year (she’s got four months on this year’s other octogenarian nominee, “Into the Wild’s” Hal Holbrook) and the second oldest nominee in history (following “Titanic’s” Gloria Stuart). If she wins the Oscar, she’ll be the oldest actor to win in any major category. When the nominations were read, Dee wasn’t perched in front of the television like most everyone else in Hollywood. She was in North Carolina preparing to give a Martin Luther King Jr. celebration keynote speech at the state’s university in Chapel Hill. “My granddaughter called me and gave me the news,” she says. “I was shocked.”
In case you think she’s referring to the faux shock that is in keeping with awards-show decorum, track down the footage of her win at the SAG Awards. Her expression is one of genuine bewilderment. She isn’t suffering from false modesty. She’s still carrying some baggage from a time in her career when such opportunities seemed only theoretical. “When you grow up being exposed to racism, it damages your self-confidence,” she says. “The idea of winning an Oscar was something I’d forgotten about a long time ago. I just didn’t think it was a possibility for me.”
The way Dee talks, you would think she hadn’t already spent the bulk of her life pushing the boundaries of possibility. She has survived breast cancer. She and her husband of 57 years, the late Ossie Davis, never accepted the status quo, which is why they are as revered as activists as much as thespians. They were close friends of Malcolm X and King—Davis spoke at both their funerals. They risked their careers by opposing McCarthyism, and were blacklisted as a result. Davis was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, though Dee couldn’t make it—she was home with the kids. And they never stopped fighting. In 1999, the couple was arrested while protesting the NYPD shooting of Amadou Diallo. At the time, she was 74.
Dee’s recent triumphs are bittersweet, as she continues to gracefully mourn her husband’s death in 2005. When Davis died, Dee was filming “Naming Number Two” in New Zealand. She flew home to bury her husband and was back on the set two weeks later. It was an amazing feat of resilience, not the least because Dee hates goodbyes so much, she’s never been able to bear the sight of a car backing out of her driveway. But she soldiered on at his behest. “He wasn’t the grieving type,” she says. “He always said that he didn’t want me to live like I could stop him from dying. He could be brutal in his logic.”
The subject of her late husband softens Dee’s voice and, suddenly, she’s not as averse to speaking about her life in the past tense. She stares off to the side when she reminisces about Davis, whose face is included in a mural of black luminaries hanging in Sylvia’s vestibule. Ossie and Ruby, always together, even if apart. She especially likes to talk about his sense of humor, reflected in the inscription he wrote for the urn that will someday hold both of their ashes: “In this thing together.” “I’m getting older now,” she says, as though she just rounded 40, “and I’m at a time when I can start reflecting back on the things I’ve accomplished. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have a few accomplishments left in me.” Maybe more than a few.
