Star Danielle Spencer Pass Away at 60: How Did Danielle Spencer Die?
So, yeah, it's really hard to wrap my head around this — Danielle Spencer passed away on August 11, 2025, at 60. Cancer took her, and if you're like me, that's always especially heavy, given how much she meant to a couple of different worlds: TV fans remember her as Dee from "What's Happening!!", but honestly, she went way beyond that — and that's not just me being sentimental, I swear.
Her family spokesperson, Sandra Jones, said it was untimely, and you can feel that in every word. It's always weird how people you watched as a kid are suddenly gone, and it feels way too soon, no matter what the age.
X (formerly Twitter) has been flooded with lots of tributes to the star.
Reba Hollingsworth wrote
"I loved me some “Dee” back in the day watching “What’s Happening.” Imagine my excitement when I got to meet her. She was a doctor here. So sad to hear that Dr. Danielle Spencer died last night after a long battle with cancer. She was 60. #RIP Sweet Dee"
Debbie Schwenk post reads
"I would have loved to meet her... RIP Dee"
Kim Marie wrote that she grew up watching Dee, the queen of sass on What's Happening so this one really hurts my heart.
Who Was Danielle Spencer?
I feel like a lot of people just know her as that sassy little sister, Dee Thomas, from "What's Happening!!"; she was like, this iconic smart-aleck in the 1970s. Straight-up scene stealer — if you’ve ever seen even one episode, you remember Dee giving out one-liners with all the candor of someone twice her age.
But she did way more than TV. After surviving a pretty serious car crash in 1977 (her stepdad didn't make it — that's a tragedy that, for some reason, doesn't get talked about enough), Danielle went on and reinvented herself totally: she got a doctorate in veterinary medicine in 1993. Isn’t that wild?
Not just resting on being “the kid from TV.” She even had her acting career memorialized in the Smithsonian’s Museum of African American History and Culture. Like, how do you top that? And then she spent years as a vet, helping animals and living in Richmond, Virginia.
A post on ABC’s Instagram reads
Danielle Spencer dies of gastric cancer and cardiac arrest
https://www.instagram.com/p/DNRO9iGhvMK/
Danielle Spencer's Husband
Uh, here's where things get foggy, and kind of interesting for gossip-lovers. It's not like she made a ton of headlines with her relationships; when people talk about Danielle, it's her career, that accident, or her family. In all the tributes, interviews, and obituaries, it looks like she never married — or at least, not in a way that the press grabbed onto. Her closest relationships seem to have been her mom and her brother, so if you're hoping for some grand Hollywood love story, well... maybe that's not her chapter. Sometimes people get left out of those narratives, and maybe that's fine.
Danielle Spencer's Children
Okay, so I had to read this a couple times. Danielle didn't have any kids of her own, but her brother — Jeremy Pelt, who is, by the way, a jazz musician, how cool is that? — he mentions she was an auntie to his three children, and they totally adored her.
