Emmy-Winning Stage and Screen Actress Olivia Cole Dies

Deadline has reported that Emmy-winning actress Olivia Cole, best known for her role in Roots, died at her home on January 19. She was 75. The New York Times reported that her cause of death was a heart attack, according to Linda Cooper, who is handling Cole's remains.

On the stage, Cole appeared in Romeo and Juliet at the American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, CT in 1964. She made her Broadway debut in The School for SCANDAL two years later. In 2016, she starred in Having Our Say at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, CT, and at Hartford Stage.

Her TV and film credits include Roots, Backstairs at the White House, The Women of Brewster Place, Coming Home, Some Kind of Hero with Richard Pryor, Go Tell It on the Mountain, First Sunday, Guiding Light, L.A. Law, Szysznyk, and Murder, She Wrote.

Cole had been living in Mexico for almost 30 years following her divorce from her husband in 1982.

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Photo Credit: T. Charles Erickson