Child actor and Oscar winner Patty Duke dies at 69

Patty Duke, an Oscar-winning actor renowned in the mid-20th century as a child star of stage, film and television who 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 Duke suffered on Thursday.

Duke came to wide public notice in 1959, when, at age 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 Bancroft reprised their roles, Duke won the Academy Award for best supporting actress.

The Patty Duke Show

She came to even wider attention the next year, with the debut of The Patty Duke Show, the popular ABC sitcom in which 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.

In an irony not lost on 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 her childhood.

Among them were an impoverished upbringing, parental alcoholism, her removal from her home by her managers, implication in the TV quiz-show scandals of the late 1950s, four marriages and more than one suicide attempt.

In the end, 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 December 14th, 1946, and reared in the Elmhurst section of Queens.

Father an alcoholic

Her father, John Patrick Duke, was a handyman and a cabby; her mother, the former Frances McMahon, was a cashier. Her mother, 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 - 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 behaviour makes sympathy for her afflictions impossible, but whose independence and vitality are nevertheless admirable.”

New York Times