Patty Duke won Oscar and three Emmys
Patty Duke, who won an Oscar as a teen for The Miracle Worker and maintained a long and successful career while battling personal demons, has died at the age of 69.
Duke’s agent says the actress died early Tuesday morning of sepsis from a ruptured intestine.
Duke found early success playing the young Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker, first on Broadway, then in the acclaimed 1962 film version.
In1963, she burst onto the TV scene in The Patty Duke Show. She played dual roles as identical cousins living in Brooklyn.
In 2015, she played twin roles again: as a pair of grandmas on Disney Channel series Liv and Maddie.
Born Anna Marie Pearce in Queens, N.Y., on Dec. 14, 1946, Duke had a difficult childhood with abusive parents. By 8 years of age, she was largely under the control of husband-andwife talent managers who found her work on soap operas and in print advertising while supplying her with alcohol and prescription drugs, which accelerated the effects of her undiagnosed bipolar disorder.
In her 1988 memoir, Call Me Anna, Duke wrote of her condition. The book became a1990 TV film in which she starred and she became an activist for mental-health causes.
With the end of The Patty Duke Showin 1966, Duke attempted to leap into adulthood in the 1967 melodrama Valley of the Dolls, which was critically slammed but a commercial smash. She won three Emmys for the TV film My Sweet Charlie, miniseries Captains and the Kings and the 1979 TV remake of The Miracle Worker, in which Duke played Annie Sullivan, with Little House on the Prairie actress Melissa Gilbert as Keller.
In the 1980s, she starred in a trio of short-lived sitcoms: It Takes Two, Karen’s Song and Hail to the Chief, in which she was cast as the first female president of the United States.
She starred in several stage productions, including a return to Broadway in 2003 to play Aunt Eller in a revival of the musical Oklahoma!