Remembering Patty Duke: An Actress Who Worked Miracles

Patty Duke falls into her own special niche when one discusses American movie and TV stars: 16 years old when she won her supporting-actress Oscar for her performance as unhearing, unseeing Helen Keller in the 1963 movie The Miracle Worker, she was perhaps the most dramatically formidable teenage actress ever. Her scenes of physical combat with Anne Bancroft, who won Best Actress as Helen’s teacher, Annie Sullivan, are hair-raising more than 50 years later.

Consider, too, that she followed this up with her own sitcom, The Patty Duke Show (1963-66), in which she split her performance between the roles of identical cousins, one outgoing and American, the other reserved and British. The show was silly – it was a ’60s sitcom– but the concept was nonetheless shaped to emphasize that this was a young actress with the chops to play something more than (let’s grab an example out of the air) some kid-witch sidekick to Samantha on Bewitched.

The young Duke – born Anna Marie, and who went by Anna to those who knew her best – couldn’t be said to have been photogenically “cute” – but part of her appeal was that very lack of adorableness. She had an unadorned but likable averageness that didn’t seem to get in the way of her clear, natural performer’s gift.

Her fame rests largely on those early roles (or, considering the identical cousins, three roles), both shot in a black-and-white that may seem to place them even further back in the past. For many years after that, sadly, Duke was regarded instead as one of her generation’s leading cautionary tales of young talent going off the rails.

She was undermined, to some degree, by the classic Hollywood challenge of trying to find a decent vehicle for an unusual actress: 1965’s Billie, about a high-school tomboy, was an innocuous musical (Duke around that time also released several teen pop albums, which happen to be available on iTunes). That was followed in 1967 by her first and last major “grown-up” movie performance (a disastrous one, at that), in a role that came to dovetail with her image: pill-popping singer Neely O’Hara in The Valley of the Dolls, a lurid, spectacularly awful melodrama that has contributed generously to the encyclopedia of camp.

Returning to television, she won an Emmy playing an unwed mother in the 1970 TV movie My Sweet Charlie, but her disturbingly vacant, disjointed acceptance speech – it would have gone viral, if the Internet existed then – caused speculation about drugs or alcohol abuse.

Years later the actress explained that the problem was neither, that she’d suffered a nervous breakdown. The autobiography that gradually emerged from the adult Duke was a terrible story (she had been taken from her mother and raised by her agents, an abusive married couple named the Rosses) and also a second, more inspiring one: She ultimately understood and overcame years of erratic, career-undermining behavior after being diagnosed with bipolar disorder in the 1980s.

Duke remained a hard-working actress and a familiar face on television until the end of her life, usually playing strong-willed, occasionally wrong-headed women, and playing them very well. She also reprised the twins from the old Patty Duke Show in a 1999 special. She’d certainly earned the right to.