Patty Duke, the actress who has died aged 69, made an indelible impression as Helen Keller, the blind, deaf and mute child trying to learn the secret of language in The Miracle Worker, a role that made her a Broadway star aged 12 and won her, in 1963, a best supporting actress Oscar, making her, at the age of 16, the youngest actress at the time to win an Academy Award.
She went on to further success, playing a pair of identical but very different cousins in the sitcom The Patty Duke Show on ABC television (1963-66); “ Patty loves to rock ‘n’ roll, a hot dog makes her lose control . . .” ran the annoyingly catchy theme song. She turned up as a pill-popping Broadway star in the camp classic Valley of the Dolls (1967), and took home three Golden Globe awards and a series of Emmys, including for playing Helen Keller’s teacher Annie Sullivan in a 1979 NBC remake of The Miracle Worker.
Her problems began almost the day she was born Anna Marie Duke in New York on December 14 1946. Her father, a cab driver, was an alcoholic who abandoned his family when Anna Marie was six. Her mother, Frances, suffered so badly from depression she was hospitalised three times. One of Anna Marie’s earliest memories was of her mother trying to kill herself and her three children. “We’re all going together,” she said, turning on the gas. Fortunately, she had left the windows open.
When Anna Marie was eight Frances Duke was approached by John and Ethel Ross, a couple who managed child actors. “They told my mother they could give me everything she couldn’t, and my mother, who was innocent, believed them,” she recalled.
Anna Marie went to live with the Rosses, who changed her name to Patty and began to drill her for a show business career. According to her memoir they controlled every aspect of her life “from when to take a shower to what to eat, what to wear, what to say and how to say it”. They told her she was ugly and refused to let her socialise with other children. When she was 13 they began to ply her with alcohol and drugs - “happy pills” that turned out to be Thorazine, Stelazine and Percodan.
Both the Rosses, she claimed, had also molested her sexually. The worst part, however, was the separation from her mother, “the Rosses systematically convincing me that [she] was insane”.
Yet, as she conceded, the mistreatment worked. Aged eight she appeared in a dance routine on an NBC television show, and in 1958 she was a young Cathy to Richard Burton’s Heathcliff in a television production of Wuthering Heights. For 18 months before the audition for the Broadway production of The Miracle Worker, the Rosses spent some time each day treating their protegée as if she were deaf and blind, banging pots and pans behind her until she no longer reacted and making her do household chores blindfold.
When, in 1965, she went on tour promoting The Patty Duke Show, a reporter who accompanied her for a day noted that she said “thank you” no fewer than 43 times “to stagehands, technicians, press agents, reporters and the Rosses”, remained “unfalteringly perky and polite”, entertaining her companions with little jokes and songs, and smiled “often and well”.
“I was just like a little computer then,” Patty Duke recalled later. “Like an automaton.”
By her account, her break with the Rosses began later the same year when Ethel Ross’s mother advised her, on her deathbed, to get away from the couple. She found her escape in marriage, aged 18, to her former assistant director Harry Falk. Shortly afterwards she discovered that the Rosses had spent most of the money she had been earning. “Without either myself or my parents having any kind of say in the matter, my earnings supported a decade’s worth of [the Rosses’] very expensive living,” she wrote.
Though she had broken free from the Rosses, however, her mental state was deteriorating. During her marriage to Falk she made the first of several suicide attempts, began suffering from eating disorders and started seeing a string of psychiatrists. After the marriage broke up, she took up, aged 24, with the 17-year-old Desi Arnaz Jr, a relationship which was widely publicised due to the vocal opposition of Arnaz’s mother, the actress Lucille Ball.
In 1970 she met Michael Tell, a Las Vegas-based rock concert promoter, when he came to sublet her apartment; they were married 13 days later but the marriage was annulled in less than a month. In February 1971 she gave birth to a son, whom she had originally claimed was by Arnaz, though paternity tests later established he was Tell’s.
The real turning point in her life came in 1982 when she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder (known at the time as manic depression) and prescribed drugs which evened out the highs and the lows. She went on to become a vocal campaigner on mental health issues and in 1992 published A Brilliant Madness (with Gloria Hochman), describing her experience of bipolar disorder and explaining the condition and its treatment. She served as president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1985 to 1988.
In 1986 she was married, for the fourth time, to Michael Pearce, a soldier she had met while filming a television movie, and with whom she adopted another son. He and her children survive her.
Patty Duke, born December 14 1946, died March 29 2016
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