CHICAGO — The obituary for Danitra Vance, who died last week of breast cancer at the age of 35, told a quietly remarkable story - but only half the story.

The obit provided an impressive resume: First African-American woman to join the regular cast of Saturday Night Live. Actress in Hollywood films and off-Broadway shows. Winner of an Obie award and an NAACP Image Award.

But anyone who read the resume had to wonder. How did a girl from Chicago's Princeton Park Homes manage to travel so high and far before coming back to die too soon in her old room in her grandfather's house?

I called her sister, Latrice Lee, and her grandfather, Clarence Edwards, at home in Markham and asked. This is what they said: The short life of Danitra Vance began on the South Side, in a working-class household composed of her mother, her younger sister and her mother's parents. All were nonsmoking, nondrinking vegetarians who entertained themselves by telling stories at family "humorous hours."

Danitra was the quiet one of the bunch, but at Thornton High School she excelled on the debate team, and her theater performances at Roosevelt University helped her win a position at the Webber-Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London.

In London, Vance lived for a while with other hardy, aspiring actresses in an abandoned house without running water. Eventually, she returned to Chicago with Shakespearean training and a dream - to perform Shakespeare on the stages of New York.

But she went to New York only to be told, "Sorry. Blacks don't do Shakespeare," so she came home and took a job teaching high school in Gary, Ind.

Her students were teen-agers with drugs, guns and babies, and they helped inspire the characters who would catapult her into a modest version of fame.

Among her many creations was Harriet Hetero the Feminist Stripper. ("I take off my clothes when I wanna take off my clothes. Don't tell me when to take off my clothes.'') Another was a ghetto Shakespearean actress. ("Hey Romeo, hey Romeo, where you at?'')

Vance found the courage to bring her characters to open-mike nights at Zanies in Old Town. Her act caught on, and she eventually took it to New York, alternating performances with jobs as a waitress and a Bloomingdale's sales clerk.

Then, in 1985, she cracked the big time.

On her first appearance on Saturday Night Live, with her mother and sister in the audience, she performed her best-known invention, Cabrini Green Harlem Watts Jackson, the 17-year-old mother of two.

Vance lasted only a year on the show, however, in part because she resented routinely being cast as a maid or a prostitute. More than anything, she wanted her work to communicate the inner lives of black women, real black women, not stereotypes. And during the years, she found ways to do that, most notably in her Obie-winning performance in Spunk, based on the stories of a black writer, Zora Neale Hurston.

Vance had what her grandfather calls "a struggling soul," and she brought that to her work, which was her life. She always believed she could be as big as Whoopi Goldberg, though she resented the frequent comparison, which, as she once said, made it seem that there could be only one famous black female comedian at a time.

And who knows, maybe one day she would have been as big as Whoopi, if it hadn't been for the lump. She found it in 1989. She had a radical mastectomy. The cancer went into hiding.

In 1991, while she was home for Christmas, she felt a new pain. She thought it was caused by repeatedly lifting a cast-iron skillet in the play she was performing in L.A. In truth, the cancer had eaten into her shoulder blade and spine, just as later it would ravage a hip and thigh.

Finally, in April, she came back to the house in Markham where she had lived as a girl. She stayed in bed and watched old movies - her favorite was An Affair to Remember - and on the wall she hung a collage of photos of herself and people from her acting life - Jodie Foster, Paul Simon, Oprah Winfrey.

Last Sunday night, far from the footlights, she died.

Her friends and family gave her a "going-away party" featuring apple-bobbing and bean-bag throws because Danitra Vance - Shakespearean comedian and struggling soul - wanted her services at an amusement park.

Danitra L Vance