R.I.P. Danielle Spencer, What's Happening!!'s little sister Dee

Danielle Spencer has died. The former child actor who starred on the groundbreaking sitcom What’s Happening!! before becoming a veterinarian later in life, died of stomach cancer on Monday, her brother confirmed on Instagram. She was 60.

“Many of you knew her as ‘Dee’, but she was more than a child actress,” her brother, jazz trumpeter Jeremy 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.”

Born in Trenton, N.J., in 1965 and raised in the Bronx by her mother, Cheryl, and stepfather, actor Tim Pelt, Spencer began acting at age 7 when she joined Pelt’s repertory company. She found quick success, landing an uncredited part in Serpico before scoring her defining role as Dee Thomas on What’s Happening!! Produced by Bud Yorkin, created by Good Times creator Eric Monte, and loosely based on the film Cooley High, the show was among the first sitcoms focused on Black teenagers. As the sarcastic, tattle-tale little sister Dee, Spencer showed off a hilarious deadpan that often got the better of her elders. With her catchphrase, “Oh, I’m tellin’ Mama,” Dee became one of the “brattiest children on television,” and would later be awarded TV Land’s “Character Most Desperately in Need of a Timeout” in 2006. In 2016, Spencer was inducted into the Smithsonian Institution as the youngest African American female child star on a TV sitcom.