Ted Ross

Ted Ross, born Theodore Ross Roberts on June 30, 1934, in Zanesville, Ohio, was an American actor whose Broadway career spanned from 1969 to 1976. He is best known for originating the role of the Lion in The Wiz, an all-African American reimagining of The Wizard of Oz, for which he received both a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Musical and a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actor in a Musical in 1975. He died on September 3, 2002, at the age of 68, following complications from a stroke he had suffered in 1998.

Ross grew up largely in Dayton, Ohio, where his mother, Elizabeth Russell, a nightclub singer active in the 1920s and 1930s, relocated the family when he was seven. As a young teenager, he frequented West Fifth Street's clubs, including the Owl Club and the Palace Theatre's Midnight Rambles, where he encountered performers such as Duke Ellington. He left Roosevelt High School in 1950 and enlisted in the United States Air Force. While home on furlough in 1952, he entered an amateur night contest at the Top Hat bar on Germantown Street, performing a cover of Judy Garland's "Over the Rainbow" and winning five dollars. After leaving the military, he worked as a singer and MC at venues ranging from Great Falls, Montana, to a strip bar in Los Angeles, where he landed his first stage role in Oscar Brown Jr.'s Bigtime Buck White. That production began as a workshop in Watts before moving to New York City in 1968, where it reached Broadway as Buck White in 1969.

Ross went on to appear in three additional Broadway productions: Purlie in 1970 and 1972, Raisin in 1973, and The Wiz in 1975. His portrayal of the Lion in The Wiz brought him his greatest recognition, and he reprised the role in the 1978 film adaptation, which featured Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Richard Pryor, Nipsey Russell, and Lena Horne. His first film credit was The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings, a baseball picture starring James Earl Jones and Richard Pryor. Subsequent film appearances included Ragtime, Amityville II, Police Academy, Stealing Home, and Arthur, in which he played Bitterman, the chauffeur to Dudley Moore's title character. His final film role came in the 1991 production The Fisher King.

On television, Ross appeared in the sitcoms Benson, The Jeffersons, What's Happening Now!!, The Cosby Show, and its spin-off A Different World. In 1990, he played Troy Maxson in a Cincinnati stage production of August Wilson's Fences, which marked the first time his family had seen him perform live since the amateur contest in 1952. Ross returned to Dayton permanently in 1997 and opened Your Place, a jazz club on West Third Street, where he occasionally performed. He also appeared as part of the Dayton Art Institute's Just Jazz series. He was honored by Dayton's Wayman Chapel AME Church, the Miami Valley Fisk University Alumni Club, and by WROU-FM as a Black History Month Achiever.