Robert Hooks

Robert Hooks (born Bobby Dean Hooks; April 18, 1937) is an American actor, producer, and activist. Along with Douglas Turner Ward and Gerald S. Krone, he founded The Negro Ensemble Company. The Negro Ensemble Company is credited with the launch of the careers of many major black artists of all disciplines, while creating a body of performance literature over the last thirty years, providing the backbone of African-American theatrical classics. Additionally, Hooks is the sole founder of two significant black theatre companies: the D.C. Black Repertory Company, and New York's Group Theatre Workshop. Biography Early life The youngest of five children, Hooks was born in Foggy Bottom, Washington, D.C. to Mae Bertha (née Ward), a seamstress, and Edward Hooks who had moved from Rocky Mount, North Carolina with their four other children, Bernice, Caroleigh, Charles Edward "Charlie", and James Walter "Jimmy". Named Bobby Dean Hooks at birth, Robert was their first child born in Washington, DC and the first to be born in a hospital. His father, Edward, died in a work accident on the railroad in 1939. Hooks attended Stevens Elementary School. In 1945, at the insistence of his sister Bernice who was doing community arts outreach for youngsters at Francis Junior High School, he performed the lead in his first play, The Pirates of Penzance, at the age of nine. From the ages of 6 to 12, Bobby Dean journeyed with his siblings to Lucama, North Carolina to work the tobacco fields for his uncle's sharecropping farm as a way to help earn money for the coming school year in D.C.