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Oscar-winning actress Patty Duke dies at 69 Patty Duke, child star, Oscar winner and advocate for mental health, dies at 69
(about 17 hours later)
NEW YORK — Patty Duke, who as a teen won an Oscar for playing Helen Keller in “The Miracle Worker,” then maintained a long career while battling personal demons, has died at the age of 69. Patty Duke, a onetime child actress who won an Oscar at 16 and overcame an exploited youth and ravaging mental illness to excel in television, theater and film for more than half a century, died March 29 at a hospital in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. She was 69.
The actress died early Tuesday morning of sepsis from a ruptured intestine, according to her agent, Mitchell Stubbs. She died in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, where she had lived for the past quarter-century, according to Teri Weigel, the publicist for her son, actor Sean Astin. Her death was reported by the Associated Press. The cause was sepsis from a ruptured intestine, according to her agent, Mitchell Stubbs.
Duke astonished audiences as the young deaf-and-blind Keller first on Broadway, then in the acclaimed 1962 film version, appearing in both alongside Anne Bancroft as Helen’s teacher, Annie Sullivan (who won an Oscar of her own). Ms. Duke began acting in grade school in TV shows and commercials and was propelled to fame when she received the Oscar for best supporting actress for her performance in “The Miracle Worker” (1962) as a young Helen Keller, the author and activist who was deaf, mute and blind. Anne Bancroft played Keller’s untiring instructor, Annie Sullivan, and received the Oscar for best actress.
Then in 1963, Duke burst on the TV scene starring in her own sitcom, “The Patty Duke Show,” which aired for three seasons. She played dual roles as identical cousins Cathy, “who’s lived most everywhere, from Zanzibar to Barclay Square” while (according to the theme song) “Patty’s only seen the sights a girl can see from Brooklyn Heights. What a crazy pair!” The two women had previously appeared together in a Broadway production of “The Miracle Worker” written by William Gibson, with Ms. Duke featured alongside the more prominent Bancroft on the marquee.
In 2015, she would play twin roles again: as a pair of grandmas on an episode of “Liv and Maddie,” a series on the Disney Channel. On stage and on screen, Ms. Duke stunned audiences with her ability to mimic the blank gaze of the blind. With poignant verisimilitude, she showed Keller breaking through the agonizing isolation of her disability, a triumph encapsulated in a memorable scene in which Sullivan, vigorously working a pump, watches as her pupil holds her hands under the spout and slowly utters the word “water.”
“We’re so grateful to her for living a life that generates that amount of compassion and feeling in others,” Astin told The Associated Press in reflecting on the outpouring of sentiment from fans at the news of her death. Ms. Duke continued her rise on television, starring from 1963 to 1966 in the ABC sitcom “The Patty Duke Show.” The young actress played two roles — Patty Lane, a bouncy American teen, and Cathy Lane, her identical, brainy Scottish cousin who comes to live with the Lanes in her Brooklyn Heights home.
She had “really, really suffered” with her illness, Astin added. From late last week until early Tuesday morning, he said, “was a really, really, really hard process. It was hard for her, it was hard for the people who love her to help her....” Their adventures and misadventures bordered on the absurd but firmly established Ms. Duke — as well as the show’s perhaps too-catchy theme song — in the collective memory of the 1960s.
But throughout her life, she was “a warrior,” he said. “You watch this 4-foot-10, tiny imp of a lady who’s more powerful than the greatest military leaders in history.” Unbeknown to viewers of the peppy show, Ms. Duke’s young celebrity had been engineered in large part by her managers, John and Ethel Ross. Years later, Ms. Duke would accuse them of giving her alcohol and prescription drugs and sexually molesting her.
Born Anna Marie Duke in the New York borough of Queens on Dec. 14, 1946, she had a difficult childhood with abusive parents. By 8 years old she was largely under the control of husband-and-wife talent managers who kept her busy on soap operas and advertising displays. The stage, she once told an interviewer, was her “safe haven” because “they couldn’t come up there and make me crazy.”
In the meantime, they supplied her with alcohol and prescription drugs, which accentuated the effects of her undiagnosed bipolar disorder. Proud of her accomplishments in “The Miracle Worker,” Ms. Duke said that she resented the silliness that was forced upon her in the sitcom. In part to distance herself from the TV show, Ms. Duke accepted a role in the raunchy “Valley of the Dolls,” the 1967 film based on the best-selling book by Jacqueline Susann, as Neely O’Hara, a pill-addicted vaudeville star.
In her 1988 memoir, “Call Me Anna,” Duke wrote of her condition and the diagnosis she had gotten only six years earlier, and of the subsequent treatment that helped stabilize her life. The book became a 1990 TV film in which she starred, and she became an activist for mental health causes, helping to de-stigmatize bipolar disorder. Off screen, Ms. Duke suffered crippling bouts of mental illness. She was hospitalized at times and attempted suicide. She found relief only after being diagnosed with and beginning treatment for bipolar disorder in 1982.
With the end of “The Patty Duke Show” in 1966, which left her stereotyped as not one, but two squeaky-clean teenagers, Duke attempted to leap into the nitty-grittiness of adulthood in the 1967 melodrama “Valley of the Dolls,” in which she played a showbiz hopeful who falls prey to drug addiction, a broken marriage and shattered dreams. Ms. Duke wrote about her illness in the book “A Brilliant Madness: Living with Manic Depressive Illness” (1992), co-authored with Gloria Hochman. While maintaining her acting career, principally on television, she became widely known as an advocate for mental health.
The film, based on the best-selling Jacqueline Susann pulp novel, was critically slammed but a commercial sensation. Anna Marie Duke was born in New York City on Dec. 14, 1946. Her father was a cabdriver, and her mother, who suffered from depression, supported her children as a cashier after the couple separated.
During her career she would win three Emmy Awards, for the TV film “My Sweet Charlie,” the miniseries “Captains and the Kings” and the 1979 TV remake of “The Miracle Worker,” in which Duke played Annie Sullivan with “Little House on the Prairie” actress Melissa Gilbert as Keller. Ms. Duke met her agents through her older brother, Ray, whom they also represented. In an autobiography, “Call Me Anna” (1987), co-authored with Kenneth Turan, the actress recalled how the Rosses demanded she take a stage name.
“I know she’s in a better place. I will miss her every day but I will find comfort in the words of Helen Keller: ‘The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched — they must be felt with the heart,’” Gilbert wrote in tribute. “Anna Marie’s dead,” she said they told her. “You’re Patty now.”
In the 1980s, she starred in a trio of short-lived sitcoms: “It Takes Two,” ‘’Karen’s Song” and “Hail to the Chief,” cast as the first female president of the United States. For periods, Ms. Duke lived with the agents.
“Her career ebbed and flowed,” said Sean Astin, her son with her third husband, actor John Astin, “and sometimes she was stressed about it and sometimes she was at peace with it. And then she’d get to do something that she could sink her teeth into, that reminded her of what she was capable of.” “I was stripped of my parents, I was stripped of my name, I was eventually stripped of my religion, and they had a blank slate to do with as they wished,” she wrote. “When I was with the Rosses, I quickly went into a kind of limbo, similar to the mind-set of people who are in jail or even mental hospitals. You simply cannot think about the bad things because there is nothing you can do about them.”
In addition to her acting career, Duke served as the president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1985 to 1988. Among her earliest TV assignments, at age 8, was an appearance in a dance routine on “The Voice of Firestone.” She polished her diction, eventually learning to speak in a British accent for appearances in television productions including “Wuthering Heights” (1958). (Ms. Duke portrayed a young Cathy, with Richard Burton playing Heathcliff.)
She starred in several stage productions, including a return to Broadway in 2002 to play Aunt Eller in a revival of the musical “Oklahoma!” She had amassed dozens of television appearances by the time she appeared on Broadway in 1959 in “The Miracle Worker.”
By then, she already had spent a dozen years living in Idaho with her fourth husband, Michael Pearce (who survives her), seeking refuge from the clutter, noise and turmoil of big cities, and from the tumultuous life she had weathered in the past. “Miss Duke, with never an instant’s hesitation, gives us the tortured, infuriated mind within the little child,” theater critic Richard L. Coe wrote in The Washington Post. “The busy little face, the violently active body, the sheer, ghastly loneliness and the triumphant, astonishing breakthrough to the inner mind are expressed in unerring mime. This child’s performance is a marvel.”
In describing the role of Aunt Eller, and perhaps herself, to The Associated Press, she said, “This is a woman who has had strife in life, made her peace with some of it and has come to the point of acceptance. Not giving up.” Ms. Duke was married at 18 to director Harry G. Falk. After they divorced, she wed rock music promoter Michael Tell but separated from him weeks later. Her subsequent marriage to actor John Astin also ended in divorce.
___ Survivors include her husband of 30 years, Michael Pearce; a son from Tell who was adopted by Astin, the actor Sean Astin; a son from her third marriage, Mackenzie Astin; a son from her fourth marriage, Kevin Pearce; and several grandchildren.
This story has been corrected to reflect that Patty Duke was born Anna Marie Duke. Even in the throes of her illness, Ms. Duke continued to act. She received Emmy awards for her performances in “My Sweet Charlie” (1970), a TV movie about the relationship between a pregnant white woman from the South and a black lawyer from New York; “Captains and the Kings” (1976), a miniseries about an Irish immigrant; and a 1979 TV movie of “The Miracle Worker” in which Ms. Duke took on the role of Sullivan and Melissa Gilbert played Keller.
___ She served as Screen Actors Guild president from 1985 to 1988.
Associated Press writer Lauri Neff contributed to this report. “I’ve survived,” she wrote in her autobiography. “I’ve beaten my own bad system and on some days, on most days, that feels like a miracle.”
Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Read more Washington Post obituaries :
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