(NEXSTAR) — Dr. Danielle Spencer, the former child star beloved for her role as Dee on ABC’s “What’s Happening!!,” has died, according to her brother and her former co-star. She was 60.
Spencer’s brother, the jazz musician Jeremy Pelt, posted to Instagram early Tuesday morning to share that his “big sister…lost her battle with cancer.”
“Many of you knew her as ‘Dee,’ but she was more than a child actress,” Pelt wrote. “She was a friend, an auntie to my three children who adored her, she was a daughter[,] and in many ways, my mother’s best friend, she was a veterinarian, she was someone who always remained positive even during her darkest days fighting this disease. And she was MY sister and protector.”
“I watched her take her last breath… I’m thankful for that,” he added. “I love you, forever.”
In a post to Instagram on Tuesday, Haywood Nelson — who played Dwayne Nelson on the 1970s sitcom — also paid tribute to his long-time friend.
“Dr. Dee, our brilliant, loving, positive, pragmatic warrior, without fail, has finally found her release from the clutches of this world and a body,” he wrote. “We celebrate Danielle Spencer and her contributions as we regret to inform her departure and transition from a long battle with cancer.”
Nelson said Spencer died Monday, telling The Hollywood Reporter that she passed at a hospital in Richmond, Virginia. Pelt and Nelson did not share any additional details, and representatives for Spencer did not immediately respond to Nexstar’s request for comment.
-
LOS ANGELES – CIRCA 1977: Actress Danielle Spencer from the TV show ‘What’s Happening!!’ does her school work on her dressing room circa 1977 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images) -
WHAT’S HAPPENING!! – “Raj Moves Out” – Airdate: November 30, 1978. (Photo by ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images)
ERNEST THOMAS;DANIELLE SPENCER
In the late 1970s, Spencer played Dee Thomas, the younger sister of Raj, played by Ernest Lee Thomas, on all three seasons of “What’s Happening!!” The show followed three teenagers growing up in Los Angeles. She later reprised her role for the sequel series, “What’s Happening Now!!,” which ran from 1985 to 1988.
After the sequel was canceled, Spencer attended UC Davis and UCLA before earning her doctorate in veterinary medicine from Tuskegee University in 1993. Some of her last acting credits on IMDb include her roles as a veterinarian in the 1997 film “As Good As It Gets” and a 2001 short “Peter Rabbit and the Crucifix.” She also appeared in a 2001 episode of “Days of Our Lives.”
Three years later, Spencer was temporarily confined to a wheelchair as a result of a serious car crash nearly three decades prior.
Spencer was in a coma for three weeks after a serious 1977 car crash that claimed the life of her stepfather, Tim Pelt, Forbes reports. She would later experience paralysis caused by spinal stenosis, which occurs “when the space inside the backbone is too small, according to the Mayo Clinic.
Symptoms set in in 2004, according to the Chicago Tribune, and she required a wheelchair. She was able to learn how to walk again with therapy, but in 2018, Spencer required an emergency brain surgery for a bleeding hematoma related to the car crash.
Spencer had also been diagnosed with breast cancer in 2014 and was “cancer-free” after four months of chemotherapy, according to her biography.
She is survived by her mother and her brother Jeremy.
