Mary Alice, American actress and the Emmy and Tony award winner has passed away. According to reports, Mary Alice died at home at the age of 85 on 27 July 2022, in Manhattan, New York, United States.
Mary Alice Smith was born in 1936 in Indianola, Miss., and spent several years as a schoolteacher in Chicago before moving to New York to pursue acting full time. In a career that spanned more than three decades, Alice performed on stage and screen, in comedies and dramas.
She won an Obie Award in 1979 for her performance as Portia in Joseph Papp’s Off-Broadway production of Julius Caesar. Her TV credits included Police Woman, Cosby and Sanford & Son. In 1991, she won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series for I’ll Fly Away.
In A Different World Alice played the delightfully eccentric, soft-spoken Leticia “Lettie” Bostic. Among her more than a dozen movie credits are Sparkle in 1976, Malcolm X in 1992 and The Matrix Revolutions in 2003.
In an interview with Contemporary Film, Theatre & Television, Alice said she was “proud” to be an actor. “I chose this profession because I feel this is how I can fulfill my service as a human being–communicating the human condition,” she continued, “My desire is to create interesting and complex characters on film and television.”
