Olivia Cole, the Emmy-winning actress best known for her performances in the 1970s miniseries Backstairs at the White House and Roots, has died. She was 75.
Cole died Friday Jan. 19, at her home in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, her agent, Susie Schwarz at SDB Partners, told The Hollywood Reporter. No cause of death was immediately available.
Cole also portrayed the gossipy Miss Sophie alongside Oprah Winfrey on the 1989 ABC miniseries The Women of Brewster Place and on a subsequent, short-lived series.
Cole received her supporting actress Emmy for her turn as Matilda — the wife of Ben Vereen’s Chicken George and mother of Georg Stanford Brown’s Tom — on Alex Haley’s Roots, which was broadcast on ABC in January 1977 on eight consecutive nights and watched by an estimated 140 million people.
On the nine-hour 1979 NBC miniseries Backstairs at the White House, Cole was perhaps even more memorable as Maggie Rogers, the mother of Leslie Uggams’ Lillian Rogers Parks. Both real-life women spent years working as maids for U.S. presidents over several decades.
For that performance, Cole received another Emmy nom, for outstanding lead actress in a limited series or special, and “established her, with the possible exception of Cicely Tyson, as the finest black dramatic actress in Hollywood,” People magazine noted in a 1979 profile.
Cole also appeared as Corrine in the best picture Oscar nominee Coming Home (1978); in Some Kind of Hero (1982), with Richard Pryor; opposite Paul Winfield in James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (1984); and with Ice Cube in First Sunday (2008).
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Source: Hollywood Reporter
