1. Theodore Ross Roberts was an American actor best known for his role as the Lion in The Wiz, an all-African American reinterpretation of The Wizard of Oz.
11 Facts About Ted Ross
1. 2.
Ted Ross won a Tony Award for the original 1975 Broadway production and recreated the role in the 1978 film version which starred Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Richard Pryor, Nipsey Russell, and Lena Horne.
3.
Ted Ross was born in Zanesville, Ohio, but his mother, Elizabeth Russell, a nightclub singer in the 1920s and 1930s, moved the family to Dayton when young Ted Ross was seven.
4.
Ted Ross dropped out of Roosevelt High in 1950 and enlisted in the United States Air Force.
5.
Two years later at age eighteen, Ted Ross entered an amateur night contest at the Top Hat bar on Germantown Street.
6.
Ted Ross starred in The Wiz and other Broadway productions, such as Purlie, Ain't Misbehavin, and Raisin in the Sun.
7.
In 1990, Ted Ross played Troy Maxson in a Cincinnati production of August Wilson's Fences.
8.
Ted Ross came home to Dayton, Ohio for good in 1997 and opened Your Place, a jazz club on West Third Street.
9.
Occasionally, Ted Ross sat in and sang in his club, and performed as part of the Dayton Art Institute's Just Jazz series.
10.
Ted Ross was honoured by Dayton's Wayman Chapel AME Church, the Miami Valley Fisk University Alumni Club and by WROU-FM as a Black History Month Achiever.
11.
Ted Ross suffered a stroke in 1998, and died from complications four years later at Good Samaritan Hospital on September 3,2002, aged 68.