Ruth Warrick, Star of Film and Soaps, Dies

Ruth Warrick, in a 1940 RKO Radio Pictures photograph. The next year, she played Orson Welles's wife in the classic "Citizen Kane."

Ruth Warrick, 88, who died of pneumonia Jan. 15 at her home in New York, was the last surviving star of Orson Welles's film "Citizen Kane" and became a fixture on the soap opera "All My Children."

As Emily Norton Kane, the icy first wife of fictional publisher Charles Foster Kane, and then as the vain and vengeful Phoebe Tyler Wallingford on ABC's "All My Children," Ms. Warrick specialized in elegant, complicated matriarchs. As Wallingford, she was twice nominated for Daytime Emmy awards and was honored in May with an Emmy for lifetime achievement.

Ms. Warrick's casting in coldly intelligent roles belied a blunt, sometimes bawdy sense of humor.

During one "All My Children" rehearsal, she approached a bored cameraman and flashed open her cape to reveal that she was topless. Later, to protest the network's poor air-conditioning system, she conducted rehearsal in a housecoat unzipped to her belly button. She said she liked slipping into the ocean at public beaches in a long top and panties.

"I do like to shock and surprise people," she once said. "When it's all in good fun, of course."

Her tell-all memoir, "Confessions of Phoebe Tyler" (1980), detailed an affair with actor Anthony Quinn. Ms. Warrick -- who married and divorced five times -- was more circumspect about whether she consummated a relationship with Welles.

"I loved him," she told Time magazine in 1991. "It wasn't just a crush. I adored him, although I never let myself do anything about it. Orson sent for me a couple of times after the picture ended, and I did go one time, but I realized what the situation was and what he wanted from me and what would undoubtedly have happened.

"I was a married woman and I had a baby," she said. "I would have adored it, but I just couldn't do it because I'm a lady. But if you believe what Jimmy Carter says, that we sin in our hearts, then yes, I did."

In another interview, she admitted outright to a fling with the director, attributing it to hero worship and a failing first marriage.

Ms. Warrick could be outlandish, outdoing all the pretensions at a diamond-studded Broadway opening by wearing a flamboyant crown. She also was a sincere Democratic political activist engaged in voter registration drives. Moreover, she taught acting to poor black and Hispanic students in New York and helped start a job-training program in the Watts section of Los Angeles after riots there in the 1960s.

Ms. Warrick was born June 29, 1916, in St. Joseph, Mo., to a strict Baptist family. She described having a nervous breakdown in high school, troubled by her mother's strict code against having sexual relations with men she liked.

Excited by memories of traveling shows, she studied drama at what is now the University of Missouri at Kansas City. She won a beauty contest to promote the Kansas City fall festival and soon settled in New York, where her looks and mellifluous voice won her modeling and radio work. She found a job with Welles's legendary radio acting company, Mercury Theater of the Air.

The troupe, known for groundbreaking theatrics, was home to many of the rising stars who appeared in "Citizen Kane" (1941), among them Joseph Cotten and Agnes Moorehead.

Though it has masterpiece stature now, "Citizen Kane" was far from a triumph for Welles during its initial release. The film, a scathing look at power and corruption, was seen as a thinly veiled attack on publisher William Randolph Hearst. Powerful gossip columnist Louella Parsons, who worked for him, tried to destroy the film and its young director.

In a television interview in 1996, Ms. Warrick recalled that Parsons left the "Kane" screening "purple in the face, and her wattles were wobbling like a turkey gobbler."

After "Citizen Kane," Ms. Warrick plodded along in ladylike roles that bored her. But there was some superior fare, notably Welles's "Journey Into Fear" (1943) and Disney's "Song of the South" (1946), in which she played the newly separated mother.

On the side, she conducted affairs with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Quinn, whom she especially liked. "He was a mass of contradictions and insecurities," she said, "but oh, he was some man. He'd bring records to the set and teach me to tango. Then we'd go for these long, rambling walks."

In the early 1950s, she returned to New York, divorced a second time, raising two children and in need of work. Initially she was opposed to soap work, telling a producer, "Mrs. Citizen Kane do soap opera?" Still, she relented and appeared on "Guiding Light," "As the World Turns" and "Peyton Place," the last earning her an Emmy nomination playing enigmatic housekeeper Hannah Cord.

In 1970, she joined the original cast of "All My Children" and stayed with the show until her death. She acted on Broadway -- a leading role opposite Debbie Reynolds in the hit musical comedy "Irene" (1973) -- but it was on television that she found her widest popularity. She sometimes had to defend Phoebe Wallingford against fans who cornered her on the street, wanting either to tell off her character or to offer guidance.

Politics remained a passion, and she traveled on the Bill Clinton campaign bus in 1992. She also became a licensed metaphysical teacher, lecturing at churches.

Strikingly attractive into advanced age, she admitted to having two facelifts. "There's no way I could look like this without them," she said.

Her marriages to Erik Rolf, Carl Neubert (they married twice), Robert McNamara (a television executive) and Jarvis Cushing Jr. ended in divorce.

Survivors include two children with Rolf; a son with McNamara; a grandson; and six great-grandchildren.