Eulogy

By RICHARD CORLISS

He had something in him--the rich baritone and the gaze that saw all and feared nothing--that suggested God on a day full of promise and threat. OSSIE DAVIS, who died last week in Miami Beach, at 87, was an actor, playwright, film director and civil rights spokesman who invested each role with passion and purity. Born Raiford Chatman Davis (the initials R.C. became Ossie), he wrote two successful Broadway shows--Purlie Victorious, a satire of race relations, and its musical version, Purlie--and, decades later, became the patriarchal conscience of seven Spike Lee films (among them Do the Right Thing, right). In 1946, at his first Broadway job, he met actress Ruby Dee. They married soon after and for 56 years pursued a fruitful acting partnership, a bold place in the fight for racial equality and one of the century's great love affairs. He died on the job, shooting a film called Retirement. But that was a dirty word to Davis, who kept busy in his ninth decade playing a nursing-home codger who believes he's John F. Kennedy ("They dyed me") in the cult comedy Bubba Ho-tep and a judge in Lee's latest film, She Hate Me. In the '60s he spoke at Martin Luther King Jr.'s and Malcolm X's funerals. At the latter, he said, "In honoring him, we honor the best of ourselves." The best of us was in Ossie Davis. --By Richard Corliss