Patty Duke
Patty Duke
Born: December 14, 1946, Elmhurst, New York City, NY
Died: March 29, 2016, Coeur d'Alene, ID
Height: 5′ 0″
Patty Duke, Child Star and Oscar Winner, Dies at 69
Patty
Duke, an Oscar-winning actress renowned at midcentury as a child star
of stage, film and television, who, amid public struggles with bipolar
disorder, went on to cultivate a respected career in adulthood as an
actress and mental-health advocate, died on Tuesday at a hospital near
her home in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. She was 69.
The cause was complications of a ruptured intestine that Ms. Duke suffered on Thursday, said her husband, Michael Pearce.
Ms.
Duke came to wide public notice in 1959, at 12, when she starred as
Helen Keller in the original Broadway production of William Gibson’s
drama “The Miracle Worker.” Anne Bancroft played Helen’s teacher, Annie
Sullivan.
For her performance in the 1962 Hollywood film adaptation, in which she and Ms. Bancroft reprised their roles, Ms. Duke won the Academy Award for best supporting actress.
She
came to even wider attention the next year, with the debut of “The
Patty Duke Show,” the popular ABC sitcom in which Ms. Duke played the
dual roles of Patty Lane, an unaffected Brooklyn girl, and her worldly,
Scottish “identical cousin,” Cathy Lane.
Broadcast on ABC, the show ran through 1966, and also starred William Schallert as Patty’s father.
Homey, comforting and sentimental, the show, with its emblematic theme song
(“Where Cathy adores a minuet,/The Ballets Russes, and crêpes
suzette,/Our Patty loves to rock and roll,/A hot dog makes her lose
control;/What a wild duet!”) remains a touchstone of American nostalgia.
But
in an irony not lost one iota on Ms. Duke, the fame she won for playing
a typical teenager — who inhabited a world of bubble gum, bobby socks
and few real problems — belied the lifelong upheavals that began in
childhood.
Among
them were a threadbare upbringing; parental alcoholism; her removal
from her home by her managers, who co-opted not only her earnings but
also, Ms. Duke later wrote, her very identity; implication in the
television quiz-show scandals of the late 1950s; sexual abuse; four
marriages; and more than one suicide attempt.
In
the end, however, Ms. Duke found contentment in an enduring fourth
marriage; the presidency of the Screen Actors Guild; the proper
diagnosis and treatment of her bipolar disorder; her public lobbying for
causes including mental health, AIDS awareness and nuclear disarmament;
and a renewed television career that brought her three Emmys.
The
youngest of three children, Anna Marie Duke was born in New York City
on Dec. 14, 1946, and reared in Queens. Her father, John Patrick Duke,
was a handyman and cabby; her mother, the former Frances McMahon, was a
cashier.
Her
mother, Ms. Duke later said, was chronically depressed; her father was
an alcoholic. When Anna was 6, her father left the family, and she saw
him again only occasionally.
Anna
began acting at about 8, when she was taken on by John and Ethel Ross,
husband-and-wife managers who represented her older brother Raymond.
The
Rosses immediately set to work neutralizing Anna’s prominent Queens
accent. They also changed her name to the pert, less ethnic-sounding
Patty.
“Anna Marie is dead; you’re Patty now,” she was told, as she recalled in a memoir, “Call Me Anna” (1987, with Kenneth Turan).
As
Patty Duke, she landed bit parts in films and on television before
being cast in “The Miracle Worker.” To prepare her to audition for the
part, the Rosses took to blindfolding her and moving the furniture
around.
Playing
the young Helen Keller — a rigorous role that required her to act,
persuasively but without sentimentality, the part of a deaf-blind child
subject to fearsome rages; to learn the manual alphabet; and to engage
nightly in an ad-libbed, highly physical onstage fight with Ms. Bancroft
that could last nearly 10 minutes — she won critical plaudits and
enduring fame.
Reviewing the play in The New York Times, Brooks Atkinson wrote:
“As
Helen, little Miss Duke is altogether superb — a plain, sullen,
explosive, miniature monster whose destructive behavior makes sympathy
for her afflictions impossible, but whose independence and vitality are
nevertheless admirable.”
In the view of many critics, Ms. Duke’s passage from Helen Keller to Patty Lane was a voyage from the sublime to the ridiculous.
From
its pilot episode, scripted by Sidney Sheldon, the show gloried in its
preposterous premise: two cousins so genetically indistinguishable that,
as its theme song proclaimed, “They laugh alike, they walk alike, at
times they even talk alike.”
But the public ate it up, along with vigorously marketed merchandise like dolls, clothes, puzzles and board games.
The show’s success — and Patty Lane’s popularity in particular — was something Ms. Duke came to deplore.
“I
hated being less intelligent than I was,” she later wrote. “I hated
pretending I was younger than I was, I hated not being consulted about
anything, having no choice in how I looked or what I wore, I hated being
trapped.”
The
Rosses, who by now saw Ms. Duke as a golden goose, removed her, against
her wishes, from her mother’s home and took her to live with them. They
monitored her every movement, she later said, telling her what to wear,
what to do and what to eat, and fiercely controlled her mother’s access
to her.
They
also, Ms. Duke said, fed her uppers and downers and introduced her to
alcohol. Both members of the couple, she later wrote, sexually molested
her on occasion.
There
was also financial malfeasance. In 1959, testifying before a
congressional committee, Mr. Ross, admitted that Patty, who had appeared
not long before on the TV quiz show “The $64,000 Challenge,” had been
fed the answers by the show’s producers.
She won $32,000 on the show, of which Mr. Ross took his standard 15 percent fee.
By
the time Ms. Duke broke with the Rosses as a young woman, she later
said, she discovered that they had embezzled the vast portion of her
career earnings — about $1 million.
To
extricate herself from the Rosses’ Svengali-like clutches, she married
Harry Falk, an assistant director on “The Patty Duke Show,” when she was
still a teenager; the marriage ended in divorce. A second marriage, to
Michael Tell, was annulled after 13 days.
In
1972, Ms. Duke married the actor John Astin; during their marriage, she
was billed as Patty Duke Astin. They divorced in 1985.
Her
other roles include the female lead in “My Sweet Charlie,” a 1970 TV
movie in which she portrayed a pregnant runaway who falls in love with a
black man, played by Al Freeman Jr. Her performance garnered her the
first of her three Emmy Awards.
On
the big screen, she appeared in “Valley of the Dolls,” the 1967
adaptation of Jacqueline Susann’s novel, playing Neely O’Hara, a woman
addicted to sex, drugs and alcohol.
But
all the while, Ms. Duke was dealing increasingly with a real-life
emotional lability for which she had no name. She attempted suicide
several times, and was committed to mental hospitals.
Only
in 1982 did she receive a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, along with
proper medication. She recounted her experiences in another memoir, “A
Brilliant Madness: Living With Manic-Depressive Illness” (1992, with
Gloria Hochman).
Ms.
Duke’s survivors include her fourth husband, Mr. Pearce, an Army drill
sergeant whom she married in 1986 (she preferred afterward to be known
in private life as Anna Pearce); her brother, Raymond; two sons, the
actors Sean Astin and Mackenzie Astin; a stepdaughter, Charlene Gibson,
from her marriage to Mr. Pearce; a son, Kevin, with Mr. Pearce; and six
grandchildren. Another stepdaughter from her fourth marriage, Raelene
Pearce, died in 1998.
Among
Ms. Duke’s other television credits are the 1976 NBC mini-series
“Captains and the Kings,” for which she won her second Emmy, and a 1979
TV adaptation of “The Miracle Worker” for which — playing Annie Sullivan
to Melissa Gilbert’s Helen — she won her third.
Ms.
Duke played her adult self in “Call Me Anna,” a 1990 TV movie based on
her memoir. Over the years she had guest roles on a string of shows,
including “The Love Boat,” “Amazing Grace,” “Touched by an Angel” and
“Glee.”
She served as president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1985 to 1988.
In
a quotation on her website, officialpattyduke.com, Ms. Duke summed up
her quicksilver life in lines whose final word fairly rings with
resonance:
“I’ve survived,” she wrote. “I’ve beaten my own bad system and on some days, on most days, that feels like a miracle.”
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