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 screen career in adulthood, died on Tuesday at a hospital near her home in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. She was 69.
Her husband, Michael Pearce, said the cause was complications of a ruptured intestine that Ms. Duke suffered on Thursday.
Ms. Duke came to wide public notice in 1959, when, at 12, 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 work 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.
‘The Miracle Worker’
Ms. Duke starred as Helen Keller and 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, British-accented “identical cousin,” Cathy Lane.
The show, which also starred William Schallert as Patty’s father, ran for three seasons.
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 and 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 TV quiz-show scandals of the late 1950s; 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; public lobbying for causes including mental health, AIDS awareness and nuclear disarmament; and a renewed television career that brought her three Emmys.
Anna Marie Duke was born in Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan on Dec. 14, 1946, and reared in the Elmhurst section of Queens. Her father, John Patrick Duke, was a handyman and a 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 7, after she was taken on by John and Ethel Ross, husband-and-wife managers who represented her older brother Ray. They immediately 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.”
A full obituary will follow.
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