Award winning actress Esther Rolle passes on
Actress Esther Rolle, who carved a career playing strong black women, including the devoted, iron-willed matriarch in the '70s sitcom "Good Times," has died. She was 78. Rolle, who also appeared as the housekeeper Idella in the film "Driving Miss Daisy," died Tuesday at Brotman Memorial Hospital in Los Angeles, her spokesman said.
The cause of death was not determined, but she had diabetes and was undergoing dialysis, he said.
"In my work I always try to show positive images of black women who aren't rich, but who are doing something with their lives," Rolle said in a 1991 interview.
A year earlier, she became the first woman to receive the NAACP Chairman's Civil Rights Leadership Award for helping raise the image of blacks through her stage, television and movie work.
Rolle was best known as Florida Evans, who began as Bea Arthur's sassy maid in TV's "Maude" and evolved into the starring character in the spinoff series "Good Times."
She played a mother struggling to keep her family together in Chicago's inner city.
Rolle insisted Florida not be a single mother and demanded a father for her TV brood. The role of dad was played by John Amos.
"I told them I couldn't compound the lie that black fathers don't care about their children ... I was proud of the family life I was able to introduce to television," she said.
"Good Times" ran from 1974 to 1979. Rolle left the show after three seasons because she felt the character played by Jimmie "J.J." Walker, who was one of her sons, was a poor example for black youth.
Walker's character had the trademark saying "Dyn-o-mite!," and was often seen as silly and lazy.
Rolle was persuaded to return for a year.
"Esther was never afraid to say things," said Ja'Net DuBois, who played next-door neighbor Willona Woods on "Good Times."
"She had always been a fighter about the racial situations. There were a lot of fights about some of the scripts," she said.
Rolle's performance as Florida was so nurturing that in 1996 Post readers voted her the Greatest TV Mom of All Time.
Rolle, who was born in Pompano Beach, Fla., on Nov. 8, 1920, was one of 18 children.
She said she based Florida Evans on her own mother.
After "Good Times," she appeared in TV movies and won an Emmy for her performance as a servant in "Summer of My German Soldier."
In a 1987 interview, Rolle said that during her career she wanted to shatter the image of a "Hollywood maid with the rolling of the eyes" who ignored her own children while caring for her white charges.
Last year she appeared in John Singleton's tragic "Rosewood" and plays Alfre Woodard's aunt who suffers Alzheimer's disease in the upcoming "Down in the Delta," a movie due out at Christmas.
-- Rita Delfiner - 11/19/98