'Family of Stangers' hits home for Patty Duke
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This is a digitised version of an article from The Cayman Compass's print archive. Occasionally, the digitisation process introduces transcription errors, or other problems.
See the article in its original context from February 1993.
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"I haven't concentrated on television," she corrects. "Television concentrated on me, and movies did not. And, thank God, many years ago, I found a healthy acceptance of that. I've had a wonderful television career. I think we're up to 43 or 44 TV movies now. I'm told that I'm the performer who's done the most- that's because I started sooner. But the lion's share of them have been terrific roles to play that I certainly wouldn't have been offered anywhere else."
On Sunday, Feb. 21, she is starring with Melissa Gilbert in CBS's "A Family of Strangers," about a young woman with a serious health problem who learns she was adopted when she tries to trace her family's medical history. Duke plays the birth mother.
Asked what attracted her to it, Duke responds immediately. "Melissa Gilbert," she says. "She attracts me to anything." (Gilbert and Duke co-starred in a 1979 TV-movie remake of "The Miracle Worker"; Duke starred in the original 1962 movie with Anne Bancroft.) "And for me, anything to do with parent-child separation and reunion is very powerful stuff," she says. "And, of course, the adoption vs. abortion vs. what do you do if you're raped dynamics." Those are issues on which Duke has strong feelings.
"I personally have not had an abortion and chose not to when it was suggested to me a number of years ago, when I had a child born out of wedlock," she says. "It was a most painful thing to do. And it was interesting to me at the time that I was excoriated by both those who were pro-life and those who were pro-choice. But I feel very strongly about a person's right to choose. I truly believe it must be up to each human being, his or her conscience or their conscience. And their relationship with their God."
In recent years, Duke has become a frequent public speaker on the subject of mental illnesses (she was diagnosed as manic-depressive in 1982) and has served for two and a half years as president of the Screen Actors Guild. "Although I rarely talk about this, I certainly know that my ego had fantasies of a political life eventually," she says. "And I found in those two and a half years that it's not all it's cracked up to be, and there's just a part of me that could never really without a whole lot of work - fit the necessary requirements."
She laughs. "That's the long way around to say my skin wasn't thick enough."
