Patty Duke

Patty Duke, born Anna Marie Duke on December 14, 1946, at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, was an American actress whose Broadway career spanned from 1959 to 2009. The youngest of three children born to Frances Margaret McMahon, a cashier, and John Patrick Duke, a handyman and cab driver of Irish descent, she grew up in the Elmhurst neighborhood of Queens. Her childhood was marked by difficulty: her father was an alcoholic, her mother suffered from clinical depression and was prone to violence, and when Duke was six, her mother forced her father out of the family home. At age eight, her care was transferred to talent managers John and Ethel Ross, who managed her career through methods that were frequently exploitative. The Rosses consistently misrepresented her age, provided her with alcohol and prescription drugs, took unreasonably high fees from her earnings, made sexual advances toward her, and required her to abandon her birth name entirely.

Duke's professional acting work began in the late 1950s, when she appeared on the soap opera The Brighter Day and took an uncredited role in the 1958 short film An American Girl. In 1959, at age twelve, she appeared as a contestant on The $64,000 Question, winning $32,000 with popular music as her category of expertise. The game show was later revealed to have been rigged, and Duke was called to testify before congressional investigators, during which she broke into tears while admitting she had been coached to speak falsely. That same year she appeared in a television adaptation of Meet Me in St. Louis, playing Tootie Smith.

Duke's first major Broadway role came in 1959, when she originated the role of Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker, opposite Anne Bancroft as Anne Sullivan. The production ran from October 1959 to July 1961, and during its run Duke's name was elevated above the play's title on the theater's billboard, a distinction believed to be the first time such recognition had been given to so young a performer. For that stage work, she received the Theatre World Award in 1960. When the play was adapted into a film in 1962, Duke reprised her role and won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, becoming, at sixteen, the youngest person at that time to receive an Academy Award in a competitive category. Prior to filming, she briefly met the activist Helen Keller. Duke's other Broadway credits include Isle of Children, Wicked, and Oklahoma!

Following the success of The Miracle Worker on film, Duke starred in her own network television series, The Patty Duke Show, which premiered in September 1963 and ran through 1966. Created by Sidney Sheldon, the series cast her in the dual role of Patricia Lane, a fun-loving American teenager, and her prim Scottish identical cousin, Catherine Lane. The supporting cast included William Schallert, Jean Byron, Paul O'Keefe, and Eddie Applegate, and the series featured guest appearances by Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, Paul Lynde, and Sal Mineo. The show earned Duke an Emmy Award nomination and lasted three seasons. In 1999, the characters were revisited in The Patty Duke Show: Still Rockin' in Brooklyn Heights, with Cindy Williams joining the cast.

After the series ended in 1966, Duke transitioned to adult film roles, most notably playing Neely O'Hara in Valley of the Dolls (1967). In 1969 she starred in Me, Natalie, portraying a Brooklyn teenager navigating life in Greenwich Village, a performance that earned her the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture Comedy or Musical. Her television work continued to generate recognition: she won her first Emmy Award for the 1970 made-for-TV film My Sweet Charlie, her second in 1977 for the miniseries Captains and the Kings, and her third in 1980 for a television adaptation of a 1979 stage revival of The Miracle Worker, in which she shifted roles to play Anne Sullivan opposite Melissa Gilbert's Helen Keller. Additional Emmy nominations followed for The Women's Room (1980) and George Washington (1984).

Duke was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 1982, and following that diagnosis she devoted considerable time to public advocacy and education on mental health. From 1985 to 1988, she served as president of the Screen Actors Guild. Over the course of her career she accumulated an Academy Award, two Golden Globe Awards, three Primetime Emmy Awards, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She was also an occasional singer and author. Duke died on March 29, 2016.