Duke’s breakout role was playing the blind and deaf Helen Keller in the Broadway play “The Miracle Worker” alongside Anne Bancroft. At 16, Duke became the youngest person at that time to win a competitive Academy Award in 1962 for her work in Arthur Penn’s film adaptation.
In 1963, the then-rising star Duke landed her own ABC series, “The Patty Duke Show,” in which she played a pair of identical cousins, earning one Emmy nomination.
Duke won a Golden Globe for her turn as a lost Brooklyn teenager in 1969’s “Me, Natalie,” which also starred a young Al Pacino making his film debut.
In 1967, Duke starred alongside Barbara Parkins and Sharon Tate in the widely-panned “Valley of the Dolls,” which went on to become a cult hit.
In the short-lived ABC series “Hail to the Chief,” Duke played the first female President of the United States as she struggled to balance her family life with her political career.
Duke won her first Emmy for the 1970 TV movie “My Sweet Charlie,” in which she starred as an unwed pregnant teenager who befriends a black man accused of murder.
