Danielle Spencer, Child Star of ‘What’s Happening!!’ Dead at 60

Danielle Spencer, who played a spunky and adorable youngster on the 1970s sitcom What’s Happening!!, has died, according to The Hollywood Reporter. She was 60.

The actress died Monday in a hospital in Richmond, Virginia, her What’s Happening!! co-star Haywood Nelson told the news outlet.

Spencer reportedly was previously diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a double mastectomy in 2014; in 2018 she reportedly underwent emergency surgery to relieve bleeding on her brain. At the time, a GoFundMe campaign was organized to help her pay for her medical expenses.

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

In September 1977, at 12 years old, Spencer survived a five-car accident on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu that killed her stepfather, who was driving. The crash left her in intensive care for several weeks. Her stepfather 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.

What’s Happening!! was loosely based on the 1975 movie Cooley High. The ABC sitcom ran for four seasons starting in 1976. Spencer played Dee, the smart-aleck younger sister of Roger “Raj” Thomas (Ernest Thomas) and daughter of Mabel (Mabel King). She became known for her catchphrase, “Ooooh, I’m gonna tell Mama!”

She reprised her role for What’s Happening Now!, a sequel series that aired for three seasons starting in 1985.

After becoming a veterinarian in 1993, Spencer played one in James L. Brooks’ 1997 film As Good as It Gets. “She had a great love of animals, she was like Betty White in that way,” Nelson told THR.

Born on June 24, 1965, Spencer was raised by her French teacher mother, Cheryl, and actor stepfather, Tim Pelt, in New York City. Spencer started acting at age 7 in a repertory company co-founded by Pelt. She had a few uncredited bit parts under her belt before landing the role in What’s Happening!! when she was 11, which brought 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.”

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

She developed a spinal condition in the early 2000s that left her paralyzed from the waist down for months.

She worked as a veterinarian for two decades in Los Angeles before moving in 2014 to Richmond, where she presented a regular morning segment about pet care for CBS affiliate WTVR-TV.

She was inducted into the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2014.

She is survived by her mother and brother Jeremy.