Vinie Burrows, Acclaimed Actress Who Became an Activist, Dies at 99

Vinie Burrows, a Harlem-born stage actress who made her mark on Broadway in the 1950s, but who grew frustrated by how few choice roles were available for Black women and turned her focus to one-woman shows exploring the legacies of racism and sexism, died on Dec. 25 in Queens. She was 99.

Her death, at a hospice facility, was confirmed by her son, Gregory Harrison.

Ms. Burrows made the first Broadway appearance of her seven-decade career in 1950 alongside Helen Hayes and Ossie Davis in “The Wisteria Trees,” a reimagining of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” by the writer and director Joshua Logan that shifted the drama from an aristocratic Russian estate to a 19th-century Louisiana plantation.

Her Broadway career continued to blossom into the mid-1950s. Among the high-profile productions in which she appeared was a 1951 revival of “The Green Pastures,” Marc Connelly’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1930 retelling of Old Testament stories from an African American perspective. In the early 1960s, she appeared with Moses Gunn and Louis Gossett Jr. in a New York production of “The Blacks,” a searing and surrealistic examination of racial stereotypes and Black identity by the subversive white French author and playwright Jean Genet.