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Douglas Turner Ward, the director, actor and playwright who co-founded the landmark, influential Off Broadway Black theater group the Negro Ensemble Company, died Saturday, Feb. 20, at his home in New York City. He was 90.

His death was announced by his wife Diana Ward.

Ward had already begun a solid New York stage acting career in the 1950s and ’60s – including Off Broadway roles in The Iceman Cometh and on Broadway in A Raisin in the Sun – when, according to The New York Times, he wrote a 1966 editorial for that newspaper headlined “American Theater: For Whites Only?” The article called for the establishment of a Black repertory theater company. Turner wrote, “Not in the future…but now!”

A year later the Ford Foundation awarded a $434,000 grant to create the Negro Ensemble Company with Ward as artistic director, along with Robert Hooks and Gerald S. Krone in other leadership roles.

The Company...

THR to look back at her career highlights. "I would say my career began with high points." She speaks fondly of the months after her sophomore year at Howard University when she spent the summer with the Negro Ensemble Company in New York. "This was during its heyday. The actors in that company were Moses Gunn, Hattie Winston, Rosalind Cash, Frances Foster, Esther Rolle," she says. "Robert Hooks was one of the directors of the theater. Douglas Turner Ward ...

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