Passage: Patty Duke
It happened this past week ... the passing of actress Patty Duke.
Born Anna Marie Duke in the New York City borough of Queens, she grew up in a troubled home.
Under the stage name Patty Duke, she stunned Broadway audiences at the age of 12 as the young deaf-and-blind Helen Keller in "The Miracle Worker" ... a role she reprised in the 1962 film opposite Anne Bancroft as her teacher.
She won an Oscar for that performance.
She won notice as well for what may have been the shortest Oscar acceptance speech ever: "Thank you!"
In 1963 she debuted as the star of "The Patty Duke Show," playing the dual roles of Patty Lane of Brooklyn and her so-called identical cousin, Cathy Lane of Scotland.
But behind the scenes, Patty Duke was battling bipolar disorder, which went undiagnosed until 1982.
In the years that followed, she became a leading advocate for mental health.
And in a 1988 CBS interview she had a message for anyone who was suffering through a cycle of emotional highs and lows:
"Go to a doctor -- that's the main thing -- got to the doctor, and continue to go until it is determined that you are either manic-depressive or that you have some other problem."
A three-time Emmy winner and a past president of the Screen Actors Guild, Duke was living in Idaho with her fourth husband, Michael Pearce, when she succumbed to complications from a ruptured intestine.
Patty Duke was 69.