Ruth Elizabeth Warrick

 Ruth Elizabeth Warrick (June 29, 1916 – January 15, 2005)

She was a singer, actress and political activist, best known for her role as Phoebe Tyler Wallingford on All My Children, which she played regularly from 1970 until her death in 2005. Warrick's first big break was being hired by a young Orson Welles for Citizen Kane (1941), in which she played Emily Monroe Norton, niece of the President of the United States and Kane's first wife. She appeared in The Corsican Brothers, The Iron Major, Mr. Winkle Goes to War, and Guest in the House. Following World War II, she had a role in the Academy Award winning Disney film Song of the South; she also appeared in Daisy Kenyon, which starred Joan Crawford and Henry Fonda, but by the late 1940s her film roles were becoming infrequent and less notable. After playing Betty Hutton's sister-in-law in Let's Dance, she starred as a troubled wife looking back at her life in the religious drama Second Chance and an alcoholic wife and mother in One Too Many. During the 1961-62 television season, she starred in Father of the Bride television series. Then, in 1965, she joined the cast of the primetime serial, Peyton Place, playing Hannah Cord. In 1971 she published a single with the song 41,000 Plus 4 The Ballad of the Kent State Massacre as an homage to Sandra Lee Scheuer, William Knox Schroeder, Jeffrey Glenn Miller and Allison Beth Krause, the four students killed at Kent State University during a demonstration against the Vietnam war. In her senior years, she became a spokeswoman for the rights of senior citizens as well as the disabled and was appointed to the U.N. World Women's Committee on Mental Health. She was married five times, and had three children. Warrick died of complications related to pneumonia on January 15, 2005, aged 88, at her home in Manhattan. The January 24, 2005 episode of All My Children was dedicated "In Loving Memory of Ruth Warrick". Her character, Phoebe died offscreen on May 4, 2005. Warrick is interred at Church of the Transfiguration Columbarium in Manhattan, NY .