Mary Alice, an Emmy and Tony award-winning actress who won her roles in Hollywood blockbusters (“The Matrix Revolutions”), television series (“A Different World”) and Broadway plays (“Fences”), died Wednesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 85, according to the New York City Police Department.
The death was confirmed by Detective Anthony Passaro, a police spokesman, who said officers responded to a 911 call and found that Ms Alice was unresponsive.
Mrs. Alice, a former Chicago teacher, has appeared in nearly 60 TV shows and movies. In 2000 she was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame.
She first gained significant attention in the Broadway production of August Wilson’s “Fences” in 1987. She earned a Tony Award for Best Actress for playing Rose Maxson, a 1950s housewife in Pittsburgh forced to dedicate herself to duty. balancing with anger at a flirtatious husband (played by James Earl Jones, who also won a Tony), who is enraged after a promising career as a baseball player turns into a grueling life as a garbage truck.
“Madam. Alice’s performance emphasizes strength over self-pity, open anger over festering bitterness,” Frank Rich wrote in a review for DailyExpertNews. “The actress finds the spiritual quotient in the acceptance that comes with Rose’s love for a scarred , deeply complicated man.”
The role resonated deeply for Mrs. Alice, who based her performance on memories of her mother, her aunts, and her grandmother, women “who were not educated lived in a time before the liberation of women, and their identities were tied up in their husbands.” ‘ she said in an interview with The Times that same year.
“I decided very early on that I wasn’t — well, not so much that I didn’t want to get married, but that I wanted to get to know the world,” she added. “I did that by studying, by learning, by books and by travelling.”
Mary Alice Smith was born on December 3, 1936 in Indianola, Miss., one of three children of Sam Smith and Ozelar (Jurnakin) Smith. When she was a small child, the family moved to Chicago, where they lived in a house on the Near North Side that was later demolished to make way for the Cabrini-Green housing project.
No immediate relatives survive.
Seeing teaching as a path to a stable middle-class life, she graduated from Chicago Teachers College (now Chicago State University) in 1965 and took a job teaching a public elementary school.
Still, she aspired to become an actress. “It was escapism,” she told The Chicago Tribune in 1986, adding, “We never lacked for anything. But my parents got up before the sun came up and worked all day. My father was tired. My mother had to cook. When I went to the movies, those people on the screen didn’t have to work.”
Mrs. Alice dropped the surname “Smith” and moved to New York City in 1967, where she trained with the Negro Ensemble Company, where she entered an advanced acting class taught by Lloyd Richards, the artistic director of the Yale Repertory. Theatre, which later directed “Fences.”
Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, she made frequent appearances on sitcoms such as “Good Times” and “Sanford and Son,” while making a film presence in “Sparkle,” a 1976 musical loosely based on The Supremes, and ‘Beat Street’, the 1984 break dance film that helped bring hip-hop culture to the mainstream.
She earned praise on stage in a 1980 Off Broadway production of “Zooman and the Sign” with Frances Foster and Giancarlo Esposito, as well as a 1983 Yale Rep production of “Raisin in the Sun” with Delroy Lindo.
Following her success with “Fences,” she played Lettie Bostic, a resident director at a historically black university with an intriguing past, in “A Different World,” a spin-off of “The Cosby Show.” A year later, she was hailed as the mother of Oprah Winfrey’s matriarch character in “The Women of Brewster Place,” a television miniseries based on the Gloria Naylor novel about a group of women living in a run-down housing project.
By the 1990s, she had become a familiar face in the film world. She had roles in Charles Burnett’s “To Sleep With Anger” with Danny Glover, and in Penny Marshall’s “Awakenings” with Robin Williams and Robert De Niro, in 1990; and in Spike Lee’s “Malcolm X,” starring Denzel Washington in the title role, two years later.
She also appeared in “The Bonfire of the Vanities” as the mother of a teenager who was hit by a car in a collision accident.
In 1992, she was nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series for her role in “I’ll Fly Away,” a series starring Sam Waterston and Regina Taylor set in a fictional 1950s Southern town; she won the award for the same role the following year.
Mrs. Alice almost took home another Tony in 1995. She was nominated for Best Actress for her role as the fiery Bessie, one of two centenarian sisters looking back on a century of life, in “Having Our Say,” Emily Mann’s Broadway adaptation of Sarah (Sadie)’s bestselling 1994 memoir. L. Delany and her sister Annie Elizabeth (Bessie) Delany, written with Amy Hill Hearth.
Mrs. Alice replaced Gloria Foster as the Oracle in the third installment of the Matrix film series in 2003, and continued acting until 2005, when she appeared in a television reboot of the 1970s detective show “Kojak.”
“Acting has been a big sacrifice,” she told The Tribune in 1986. “Sometimes I think if I had remained a teacher, I would have retired already. The income would have been constant. But I didn’t feel like teaching the way I do about acting. It’s my service in life. I would have to use it.”