Sandra Reaves-Phillips, the actress and singer who appeared in the films ’Round Midnight and Lean on Me and portrayed six legendary divas in a one-woman, tour de force stage show, has died. She was 79.
Reaves-Phillips died Friday at her home in Queens, family spokesperson Sandra Lanman told The Hollywood Reporter. She had been in failing health since falling off a stage during a performance of Raisin in St. Louis in 2004 and enduring serious auto accidents in 2014 and ’15 in New York.
The South Carolina native worked opposite Maurice Hines in his 2006 Broadway musical Hot Feet, and she portrayed Mama Younger and Bertha Mae Little, respectively, in Raisin on Broadway and national and European tours and in a 1999 off-Broadway production of Rollin’ on the T.O.B.A.
Reaves-Phillips was featured with saxophonist Dexter Gordon in Bertrand Tavernier’s ’Round Midnight (1986) in the role of Buttercup, and in the Morgan Freeman-starring Lean on Me (1989), directed by John G. Avildsen, she was Mrs. Powers, the music teacher who leads her students in the title song.
The production that best showcased the breadth of her considerable talent was The Late, Great Ladies of Blues & Jazz, where she captured the music and personas of Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington and Mahalia Jackson. She toured around the country and abroad with the show for more than two decades.
She also created and toured with three other one-woman shows: Bold and Brassy Blues; Heart to Heart, an R&B revue; and a tribute to Jackson.
Born on Dec. 23, 1944, in Mullins, South Carolina, to a single teenage mother, Rosa Lee, Reaves-Phillips was raised by her grandmother Mathilda, joining her in the fields to pick fruits, vegetables and cotton.
“You go six in the morning, leave six in the evening, and you get up the next morning and do the same thing,” she told an interviewer years later.
When she was 15, she moved to New York to live with her mom and had her first child a couple of years later. She began performing at amateur nights in local clubs and lied about her age in order to earn $15 for three shows a night.
Reaves-Phillips signed a recording contract that never gained traction, but an impulsive decision to sign up for the Al Fann Theatrical Ensemble in Harlem marked a turning point in her career.
Reaves-Phillips also stood out in the national tour of One Mo’ Time and in its 1990 off-Broadway sequel, And Further Mo’; played Smith in Champeen; was in Ain’t Nothin’ but the Blues and the original Paris premiere of Black and Blue; and performed in international jazz festivals and in a gospel concert at the Vatican for Pope John Paul II.
On television, she was on Another World, Law & Order, Homicide: Life on the Street and Strangers With Candy and worked alongside Ann-Margret in the 1994 NBC telefilm Following Her Heart.
Survivors include her son, Lacy Darryl Phillips, a recording artist, director and choreographer, and her daughter, Marishka Shanice Phillips, an actor, singer, writer, director and acting coach.
Two of her last performances came at Marian’s Jazz Club in Bern, Switzerland in 2014 and at the Triad Theater in New York for her son’s birthday celebration in 2019.
