Charita Bauer

Charita Bauer was an American actress born in Newark, New Jersey, on December 20, 1923, whose career spanned stage, radio, and television across more than five decades. Among her skills were singing, piano, and fluency in three languages. She began working as a model for clothing advertisements at the age of eight and received her formal theatrical training at the Professional Children's School in New York.

Bauer's Broadway career ran from 1933 to 1944. Her first stage appearance came in Thunder on the Left in 1933, and three years later she was the sole child actress in the Broadway production of The Women in 1936. Her subsequent Broadway credits included Remember the Day, Madame Capet, Your Loving Son, and the play Life of Reilly, in which a 1942 newspaper noted she was taking her first grown-up role. In 1944 she appeared in Good Morning, Corporal, a production in which reviewers observed she had matured into the role of a young woman.

Her radio work began as a child on WPAP in New York City and expanded throughout the 1930s and 1940s to include Let's Pretend, Mr. Keen Tracer of Lost Persons, The March of Time, The FBI in Peace and War, Suspense, Grand Central Station, and other programs. She portrayed Sarah O'Brien in Rose of My Dreams, Judy Todhunter in David Harum, and Mary Aldrich in The Aldrich Family, a role she later reprised in the television version of that program. She also appeared in Second Husband, The Parker Family, and Orphans of Divorce. On November 11, 1944, her appearance on Grand Central Station marked her 2,000th radio broadcast.

Bauer is best known for her portrayal of Bertha "Bert" Miller Bauer on the long-running soap opera Guiding Light, a role she originated on radio in 1950 and continued on television from 1952 until her death. In 1962, her character became central to one of American daytime television's earliest social issue storylines when Bert was diagnosed with uterine cancer, a narrative that generated a record volume of viewer mail and was credited with encouraging women to seek regular checkups and pap smear screenings. To prevent on-air confusion between her real name and her character's, Bauer asked the show's producers to name her television son Michael, matching the name of her own son, Michael Crawford. In 1983, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences honored her with a Lifetime Achievement Award. That same year, complications from a blood clot resulted in the amputation of her leg, and when she returned to the show in April 1984, the storyline was written to reflect her own experience, with Bert undergoing an amputation and subsequent rehabilitation. Bauer also received a posthumous Lifetime Contribution Daytime Emmy Award.

In 1943, Bauer married Robert Stanley Crawford, the brother of producer Cheryl Crawford. She died on February 28, 1985, at the age of 62 after a prolonged illness, survived by her father, her son, and her grandson. Her character Bert was mourned on-camera in March 1986, more than a year after Bauer herself had died.