Appreciation: Patty Duke, resilient 'miracle worker'
Patty Duke’s talent may have felt like a miraculous gift, but it did not come free.
An Oscar winner and TV star by 16, Duke, who died Tuesday at the age of 69, seemed to represent every happy teenage show business dream come true. But as she revealed in her powerful, beautifully written 1987 memoir Call Me Anna — a reclamation of her real name (Anna Pearce) that had been taken away by her agents — Duke was suffering from bipolar disorder, a condition that roiled her private life and almost ruined her career. That it didn't, ultimately, stands as a lasting testament to her skills, her resilience and her dedication.
Though her career as a child actress began on TV in the early 1950s, Duke found lasting fame playing Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker — first on Broadway, and then in that Oscar-winning role on film. In one of those turns long careers can take, she would remake the movie for TV in 1979, winning an Emmy playing Anne Sullivan to Melissa Gilbert’s Helen
The success of the original film led to her own ABC series in 1963, The Patty Duke Show, with Duke playing “identical cousins” Patty and Cathy. (Don't ask: It made sense to some of us at the time.) The series ran only three seasons, a victim of changing times and Duke’s increasingly troubled behavior. But it left behind one of TV’s most memorable theme songs, a song Duke ruefully (but not bitterly) said was continually sung to her by strangers who spotted her on the street or in an airport.
The Patty Duke Show made her a household name and, briefly, a teenage recording star. Her own big-screen vehicle, Billie, followed — until her singing and acting careers were jeopardized by a performance as Neely O'Hara in the camp classic Valley of the Dolls that remains memorable, for all the wrong reasons.
What saved her was TV and My Sweet Charlie, a 1970 TV movie that won her the first of three Emmys and reminded people of the actress they had first come to know. Playing a young, pregnant Southern girl who bonds with an African-American man on the run, Duke seemed to tap into all the pain she’d been hiding under Cathy’s sweet English accent and Patty’s fondness for hot dogs and rock 'n' roll.
