Beautiful: Debbie Allen Celebrates 97th Birthday Of Her & Phylicia Rashad’s Mom

Actress/director/choreographer, Debbie Allen (70) and her big sister a.k.a. everyone’s favorite TV mother, Phylicia Rashad (72 year old), have a lot more to celebrate, other than the fact that they are legendary in their own rights. In fact, these 2 ageless queens are celebrating their queen- their mom,

Vivian Ayers, and thanking the Higher Power for her 97th orbit over the sun. In a heartfelt online text, Debbie shared the picture of below, and showered their mothers with well deserved praise on her July 29th birthday: “Happy bornday, mother!

At 97 you are still the greatest inspiration of our lives!” In addition to Debbie’s admiration for their mon, her big sis’ has long held that same adoration for mama Vivian as well. In an 80’s throwback interview with Bill Boggs TV (video above), the “Mrs. Claire Huxtable” actress proclaimed:

I will not raise my kid differently than my mom raised me. … My mother gave us aphorisms to learn as kid.” There are 2 lessons that stuck with The Cosby Show matriarch the most: “One is, ‘The inner reality creates the outer form.’ I heard this when I was in grade school,

I was very young. And the other is, ‘The Universe bears no ill to me, I bear no ill to it,’” told, Phylicia Rashad. In a earlier interview with LATimes, Debbie Allen also spoke about how Vivian raised the known high-achieving daughters to support each other,

as opposed to competing over one another: “We grew up with not a lot of money. We grew up with racial segregation. We grew up not being available to go to ballet class or downtown to a restaurant or to a film,” told Allen, who opened the

L.A.-based Debbie Allen Dance Academy in 2001. “And so my mom, Vivian Ayers, always made us believe that we were part of a universe that welcomed us and desired our creativity and was waiting for us to do something good. And so we’ve been doing that forever.”