Danielle "Dee" Spencer from "What's Happening" dead at 60

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https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv ... 236342214/

Danielle Spencer, Sassy Young Star of ‘What’s Happening!!,’ Dies at 60
She survived a horrific auto accident during the sitcom's second season and went on to become a veterinarian.

By Mike Barnes

August 12, 2025 8:49am

Danielle Spencer, who played the precocious youngster Dee Thomas on the 1970s ABC sitcom What’s Happening!!, has died. She was 60.

Spencer died Monday in a hospital in Richmond, Virginia, her What’s Happening!! co-star Haywood Nelson told The Hollywood Reporter.

She was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a double mastectomy in 2014 and in 2018 underwent emergency surgery to relieve bleeding on her brain. A GoFundMe page was set up to help her pay for her medical expenses: https://www.gofundme.com/f/friendsofdrdaniellespencer

“She suffered for a very long time but did it with a great deal of courage,” Nelson said.

Co-produced by All in the Family‘s Bud Yorkin, What’s Happening!! was loosely based on the 1975 film Cooley High (Eric Monte wrote the movie screenplay and created the Watts-based sitcom). After a successful four-week run that started in August 1976, the comedy returned in November of that year and then for another two seasons.

Spencer played Dee, the smart-aleck younger sister of Roger “Raj” Thomas (Ernest Thomas) and daughter of Mabel (Mabel King), and she became known for her catch phrase, “Ooooh, I’m gonna tell Mama!” Nelson portrayed the down-to-earth Dwayne on the show.

She reprised the role for the sequel What’s Happening Now!, which aired for another three seasons starting in 1985.

Spencer went on to became a veterinarian in 1993, and James L. Brooks hired her to play one in his 1997 film, As Good as It Gets. “She had a great love of animals, she was like Betty White in that way,” Nelson said.

Born on June 24, 1965, and raised in New York City by her mother, Cheryl, a French teacher, and stepfather, actor Tim Pelt, Danielle Luise Spencer started acting at age 7 in a repertory company co-founded by Pelt.

She had uncredited bit parts in such films as Serpico (1973) and Harry and Tonto (1974) before landing the role in What’s Happening!! when she was 11, bringing her and her family to California.

“I had never seen any young black girl in that type of spotlight, so I didn’t have a reference point in the media as to how to deal with this opportunity,” she told Jet magazine in 2014. “I was from the Bronx. What I did was use my own family as the reference on how to portray my character.”: https://www.jetmag.com/entertainment/ev ... e-spencer/

In September 1977, Spencer was involved in a five-car accident on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu that killed her stepfather, who was driving, and left her in intensive care for several weeks. He had taken her to see Star Wars at the drive-in the previous evening.

“I didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye to my stepfather, Daddy Tim, whom I loved and who taught me show business as a young child in New York,” Spencer wrote in her 2010 memoir, Through the Fire … Journal of a Child Star.

After What’s Happening!! was canceled, Spencer and her family moved to the Ivory Coast. She then attended UC Davis, UCLA and then veterinary school at Tuskegee University, earning a doctorate in veterinary medicine in 1993.

A decade later, Spencer developed a spinal condition — perhaps caused by her auto accident — that left her paralyzed from the waist down for months.

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.

In 2014, she was inducted into the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.

In addition to her mother, survivors include her brother, Jeremy, a jazz musician.

In a 2016 interview with Hers magazine, Spencer said it was important to do “what it is that you think is going to make you happy.”

“You really have to live life for you at that minute,” she said. “And just try to have fun. Be lighthearted and be happy while you’re here, because you never know when that time is going to end.”