RIP Did You Know ... Gone Too Soon

Rosalind Cash was a very talented African American actress, who star went out in my opinion much too soon.  For the African American community she was royalty in her showmanship, very equal to that of of Meryl Streep, Katherine Hepburns, Judi Dench her talent was on that level.  Every time she appeared on the screen, you knew that she would not disappoint. She was classically trained in film and music, always very well versed.  My two favorite pieces of her work was in "The Omega Man" with she starred with Steve McQueen and "Sister Sister" sharing co-starring credits with the great Diahann Carroll and Irene Cara.  She died like she lived with belief, faith and dignity.  Below is an article written and published by Mel Gussow, as he shines a bright light on a star whose life was dimmed too soon.  KK

Rosalind Cash, 56, at Home on Stage and Screen
By MEL GUSSOW
Published: November 03, 1995

Rosalind Cash, an original member of the Negro Ensemble Company and one of its most vibrant and versatile actresses, died on Tuesday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. She was 56.
The cause was cancer, said her agent, John Sekura.  Although she was best known for her acting in naturalistic dramas like Lonne Elder 3d's "Ceremonies in Dark Old Men," Ms. Cash was equally at home in musicals and in classics, portraying Goneril to James Earl Jones's King Lear for the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1973.

Before joining the Negro Ensemble Company in 1968, Ms. Cash had a widely diverse career, singing in nightclubs and performing Off Broadway (in "Junebug Graduates Tonight!" at the Chelsea Theater Center) and on Broadway (in "The Wayward Stork"). Cast in "The Great White Hope" at the Arena Stage in Washington, she decided to forgo that play, and paid the Arena the equivalent of two weeks' salary so she could return to New York to join the new black theater company.

In the first season of the Negro Ensemble Company, she was featured in "The Song of the Lusitanian Bogey" by Peter Weiss, Wole Soyinka's "Kongi's Harvest" and Richard Wright's "Sweet Daddy Goodness." In "Ceremonies in Dark Old Men" the next year, Douglas Turner Ward played a barber facing economic hardship. Ms. Cash was his strong-minded daughter, the family's principal wage-earner. The role remained a hallmark of her career, and in 1975 she repeated it in the ABC television version.
After her initial success, she moved back and forth between theater and films. In 1980 she returned to the Negro Ensemble Company to appear in "The 16th Round" by Samm-Art Williams.

In Hollywood, she repeatedly battled stereotype. Calling herself "a one-lady movement," she was not afraid to speak her mind, realizing that as an actress, "if you yell loud enough, someone will listen." Her movies included "Klute," "The Omega Man," "Hickey and Boggs," "The New Centurions," "Uptown Saturday Night" and "Wrong Is Right" (in which she played the first black woman to become Vice President of the United States). In 1995, she was in "Tales From the 'Hood."
On television she appeared in Melvin van Peebles's "Sophisticated Gents," Maya Angelou's "Sister, Sister," "A Killing Affair" and the American Playhouse adaptation of James Baldwin's "Go Tell It on the Mountain." She was Mary Mae Ward on the soap opera "General Hospital."

Ms. Cash was born in Atlantic City and attended City College of New York.
She is survived by a sister, Helen Cash Jackson, and two brothers, Jack and Robert.