Ruby Dee was born Ruby Ann Wallace in Cleveland, Ohio. Her father was a porter and waiter on the Pennsylvania Railroad and her mother was a schoolteacher. She grew up in Harlem in New York City and was educated at Public School 119 and Hunter College. Her formal education was supplemented by instruction in classical literature and music at home. Although asked to leave Hunter College when her activities at the American Negro Theater—a Harlem group which also included Hilda Simms, Harry Belafonte, and Sidney Poitier—took up too much of her energy and time, Dee graduated in 1945 with a bachelor's degree in French and Spanish.


Ruby’s work has run the gamut of entertainment media: she has acted on stage, film, television, and radio, and she has recorded poetry. Her Broadway debut, a walk-on part in South Pacific (a play about World War II that appeared before the Rogers and Hammerstein musical), came in 1943, while she was still at college. Only three years later, she appeared on Broadway in Jeb, opposite her husband-to-be, Ossie Davis. They married in 1948 and have collaborated closely ever since. Dee achieved national recognition in the title role of Anna Lucasta in 1946-1947. She went on to principal roles in A Raisin in the Sun in 1959, Purlie Victorious in 1961, and Athol Fugard's Boesman and Lena in 1970, with James Earl Jones, for which she won an Obie in 1971. As Kate in The Taming of the Shrew and Cordelia in King Lear, she became the first black woman to play major parts in the American Shakespeare Festival. Most recently, she has appeared in Two Hah Hahs and a Homeboy in 1995 with her husband and her son, Guy Davis.