Danielle Spencer, who rose to fame in the late 1970s as sassy little sister Dee Thomas on the sitcom What’s Happening!! has died at age 60. According to TMZ, her former co-star Haywood Nelson confirmed that Spencer died Monday night in a Richmond, Virginia hospital with her mother Cheryl and her brother, jazz musician Jeremy Pelt, by her side.
As smart-mouthed little sister Dee, Spencer famously co-starred on What’s Happening!!, which aired on ABC from 1976 to 1979; alongside Nelson, who played the naive Dwayne, Fred Berry (as Rerun), and Ernest Thomas, who played Dee’s older brother, Roger “Raj” Thomas. The late Shirley Hemphill and Mabel King rounded out the cast of the show, which was loosely inspired by the 1975 film Cooley High, and focused on the hijinks of Raj and his friends from high school. Dee became known for her quips, one-liners, her catchphrase (“Oooh, I’m gonna tell Mama!”), and insults — frequently at the expense of Raj or her comic foil, Berry as Rerun. Despite its relatively short initial run of three seasons, the show became increasingly popular in syndication and saw a first-run syndicated sequel series launch in 1985 called What’s Happening Now!!, which saw most of the original series’ leads return and aired until 1988.
The Bronx native landed the role of Dee at age 11 and her family relocated to Los Angeles. During the second season of What’s Happening!!, Spencer lost her stepfather in a horrific car accident en route to the set that left the young actress in a coma for three weeks and hospitalized for months. After the show’s original run, Spencer and her family lived on the Ivory Coast for a time; she would then attend UC Davis, UCLA before earning a doctorate in veterinary medicine from Tuskegee University in 1993. In the early 2000s, Spencer developed a spinal condition that left her paralyzed from the waist down for months and was considered a long-term effect of the 1977 car accident. The Hollywood Reporter says that Spencer worked as a veterinarian for two decades in the Los Angeles area before relocating in 2014 to Richmond, where she did a regular morning segment about pet care for CBS affiliate WTVR-TV. She also appeared as a vet in the Jack Nicholson-starring 1997 classic As Good As It Gets. In 2011, she published her memoir Through The Fire…Journal Of A Child Star.
According to Fox 40, Spencer had been diagnosed with breast cancer in 2014 and was “cancer-free” after four months of chemotherapy. Also in 2014, Dr. Spencer was inducted into the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
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