All My Children
Daily News Entertainment - January 18,2005
BY David Hinkley

Actress Warrick, 88, dies

Ruth Warrick, the last surviving cast member of the film "Citizen Kane" and a daytime television legend for her three decades as Phoebe Tyler Wallingford on "All My Children," died here Saturday of complications from pneumonia. She was 88. She also created a brief flurry in 2002, when she said her longtime friend David Gest, who had married Liza Minnelli, was gay. Both Minnelli and Gest denied it, and Warrick later said she regretted making the remark.

Last May, Warrick received a Lifetime Achievement Emmy Award for her years as "Phoebe," whom she created in 1970 and played almost until her death.

She accepted the award from a wheelchair, but in good spirits.

Over a 70-year career Warrick appeared in 30 movies, several Broadway shows and countless television productions, making her most indelible mark as the endearingly scheming Mrs. Wallingford.

Among other things, Phoebe racked up multiple arrests for drunken driving, faked paralysis to stay out of jail and offered other characters large sums of money to ruin or remove people she disliked.

Her other TV shows included five years on "As the World Turns" and "Peyton Place," for which she was nominated for an Emmy.

Born in St. Joseph, Mo., Warrick was studying acting in Kansas City when a promotional tour brought her to New York's Mercury Theater, run by Orson Welles. He hired her and she followed him to Hollywood, where he cast her as first wife Emily Monroe Norton Kane in his 1941 masterpiece, "Citizen Kane."

Warrick acted in dozens of movies through the 1940s, including "Song of the South" and "China Sky," then switched mostly to television in the '50s. Along the way, she also worked on Broadway, co-starring with Jackie Gleason in "Take Me Along."

She was active in social causes, including arts in education and dropout prevention programs. In 1991, at the age of 75, she received certification as a licensed metaphysical teacher from Unity School of Practical Christianity.

She is survived by her three children, Karen, Jon and Robert. A memorial service is planned for Saturday in Manhattan and her ashes will be interred at the Little Church Around the Corner.

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