In movies such as Malcolm X, Ossie Davis wasn't just playing history. He was recreating history he had helped make.
Davis, the actor, playwright, director and witness to seminal moments of the civil rights movement was found dead Friday in his hotel room in Miami Beach, Florida, where he had been, befitting a career that spanned more 60 years, at work. He was 87.
With Ruby Dee, his frequent costar and wife of 56 years, Davis was a revered figure in the arts, and a touchstone to black artists.
Said Sean "P. Diddy" Combs as the couple was feted at the Kennedy Center Honors last December: "Ruby and Ossie, when I grow up, I want to be just like you."
Davis' screen credits, which tell only a small portion of his story, amounted to more than 80, the majority coming in the 1980s and 1990s, when a new generation of black filmmakers and stars, such as Spike Lee and Eddie Murphy, sought him out.
With Lee, Davis made six films, from 1988's School Daze to 2004's She Hate Me. In Lee's 1992 biopic of Malcolm X, Davis delivered a eulogy at the civil rights leader's funeral. It was a role Davis played in real life at X's 1965 funeral and again in 1968 at Martin Luther King Jr's.
Davis also lent his sage presence to Murphy's Doctor Dolittle remake, Grumpy Old Men and The Client. On TV, he was a regular on several shows, including two Burt Reynolds series, B.L. Stryker and Evening Shade.
"Since the loss of my father, no man has come close to represent the kind of man I hope to be some day," Reynolds said. "I know [Davis] is sitting next to God now, and I know God envies that voice."
Retirement, not a concept Davis personally endorsed, was the title of the big-screen comedy he was working on at the time of his death.
Last year, Davis appeared in Mario Van Peebles' Baadassss!, a dramatic account of the making of Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song, the pioneering blaxploitation movie by Peebles' father, Melvin.
Davis was a pioneer of the genre himself, if not because his 1970 film, Cotton Comes to Harlem, a freewheeling cop drama, was classic blaxploitation material, then because as its writer-director, he was one of the first black filmmakers to take on those roles for a major studio.
Davis' writing earned him a 1970 Tony nomination for the musical Purlie! and a 1984 Writers Guild Award for the TV movie For Us the Living: The Medgar Evers Story, about the slain NAACP leader.
As an actor, Davis was a three-time Emmy nominee, a three-time Image Award winner, a Daytime Emmy winner, a Golden Globe nominee and the recipient (with Dee in 2001) of the Screen Actors Guild Awards' Lifetime Achievement Award. He earned a second career Tony nod for his supporting work in the 1958 musical Jamaica.
Born Dec. 18, 1917, in Cogdell, Georgia, Davis arrived on Broadway in 1946 in Jeb. The play was short-lived; its effect on Davis long-lasting. It was during the production that Davis met Dee, an understudy. The two wed on Dec. 9, 1948. The union produced three children.
Davis and Dee jointly made their film debuts in 1950's No Way Out, starring fellow newcomer Sydney Poitier.
Over the next six decades, Davis pursued both work--he would draw paychecks for everything from Love, American Style to The L Word--and a mission. He butted heads with Communist-hunting Senator Joseph McCarthy; he wrote and directed 1976's Countdown to Kusini, the first U.S. movie shot in Africa with an African crew; he moved on the front lines of the civil rights movement; he intoned "A mind is a terrible thing to waste" in commercials for the United Negro College Fund.
Davis and Dee put down their history, and a nation's history, in their 1998 memoir, With Ossie and Ruby: In This Life Together. Last year, the two were feted alongside Warren Beatty, Elton John, composer John Williams and opera singer Joan Sutherland at the 27th annual Kennedy Center Honors.
Davis told CBS News the award told him the risks he and Dee took in their lives and careers were appreciated.
"It makes me feel something marvelous about the country, no matter what grievances we may have," Davis said. "This is a country that respects its rebels, too."