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Ruth Warrick (June 29, 1916—January 15,
2005) was an American actor|actress. She was born
in Saint Joseph, Missouri.

By writing an essay in high school called
"Prevention and Cure of Tuberculosis" Warrick won
a contest  to be "Miss Jubilesta", Missouri's paid
ambassador to New York City. Popular legend says
that she made her debut in New York on the steps
of New York's city hall with an armful of turkeys
for Fiorello H. LaGuardia|Mayor La Guardia.   

Warrick began her career in the 1940s as a radio
singer where she met her first husband Eric Rolf,
but her first big break was being hired by a young
Orson Welles for his film Citizen Kane, where she
played his first wife Emily Monroe Norton.  When
she auditioned for the part, she read with Welles.
 She said that because she was so new to the
acting business, she was not aware that it was
very rare to actually read with the star.  What
she also didn't realize was that this was also
Welles' first film role.  Kane proved to be a
major moment of her life and the long term success
of the film would follow her for the rest of her
life.  She celebrated her 80th birthday by
attending a special screening of Citizen Kane to a
packed, standing room only audience.  It is a
testament to the film that everyone stayed after
the film to listen to her speak.  Over the years
she collected several books about Orson Welles and
Citizen Kane, in each she would write "property of
Ruth Warrick, Mrs. Citizen Kane".  It was during
the filming of Citizen Kane that she learned she
was pregnant with her first child, Karen Rolf. 
Her son Jon Rolf was born 16 months later.

The controversy surrounding Citizen Kane led to
the film being a box office disaster and Welles,
despite co-winning an Academy Award for the
screenplay, was shunned by Hollywood. 
Nevertheless, Welles hired her again for his film
Journey Into Fear alongside fellow Kane actor
Joseph Cotten.  She worked alongside Douglas
Fairbanks, Jr., in the film The Corsican Brothers
and had a role in the Academy Award winning Walt
Disney Pictures|Disney film Song of the South, but
by the late 1940's her film role were becoming
infrequent and less notable.
In the 1950s she befriended soap opera inventor
Irna Phillips and her protege, Agnes Nixon. 
Warrick became a cast member on the soap opera
Guiding Light|The Guiding Light, playing  Nurse
Janet Johnson from 1953-1954.  Phillips was
impressed by her performance and hired her as a
cast member on her new soap opera, As The World
Turns, when the show debuted in 1956. Her
character, Edith Hughes, was madly in love with a
married man, Jim Lowell. Phillips wanted the
characters to live happily ever after, but Procter
& Gamble, which owned the show, demanded that the
characters be punished for their adultery, so Jim
died. Warrick stayed on the show until 1960, but
was so popular with fans that she would return
several times for holiday visits.

From 1959-1960 she was Una Merkel and future AMC
co-star Eileen Herlie's standby in the Broadway
production of Take Me Along.

In 1965 she joined the cast of Phillips' primetime
soap opera, Peyton Place (TV series)|Peyton Place,
playing Hannah Cord.  While there had been
previous primetime soaps (such as One Man's
Family) none had enjoyed the phenomenal success of
Peyton Place, garnering a new respect for the form
that helped to pave the way for shows like Dallas
and Dynasty. Warrick received an Emmy Award
Nomination for this show in 1967, the same year
she exited the show.  Peyton Place was cancelled
two years later.

In 1969 she made her last major film, Disney's The
Great Bank Robbery.

During this time, Agnes Nixon had been moving up
the daytime television ranks.  She had co-created
the soap opera Search for Tomorrow with Phillips,
and created her own show One Life to Live for
American Broadcasting Company|ABC in 1968. 
However, Nixon only created One Life to Live as a
means of opening the door to her real dream: a
soap opera where she could hold creative control
and tackle important issues of the day.  This was
realized when ABC greenlighted her new show All My
Children in 1969, which had been based on a
treatment that Procter & Gamble had rejected a few
year earlier.

When All My Children debuted on January 5, 1970,
Warrick was among the contracted cast, playing
Phoebe Tyler (the character's full name via her
marriages would eventually be Phoebe English Tyler
Wallingford Matthews Wallingford).  The show was
an instant hit and Phoebe became a popular daytime
character.  Phoebe's first storyline involved her
marriage to Charles Tyler.  They were unhappy in
their marriage.  Mona Kane (Frances Heflin),
Charles Tyler's secretary, fell in love with
Charles and after several years, Phoebe and
Charles were divorced. 

Phoebe spent her time being a professional
socialite.  In the late 1970s she was wooed by,
and later engaged to, Langley Wallingford (Louis
Edmonds).  She married him before learning the
truth that he was really Lenny Wlasik, a
professional conman.  Despite the deception she
still loved him and they remained married.  The
marriage was strained by the arrival of his
daughter, Verla Grubbs (Carol Burnett), and by con
artists intent on stealing Phoebe's fortune.  In
real life, Warrick became good friends with
Edmonds, to the point where he was confident in
confiding to her the secret that he was a
homosexual.

Phoebe's clan was increased when her niece Brooke
English (Julia Barr) joined the show.  Phoebe
prided herself on her proper place in society and
had her hands full trying to keep her rebellious
niece in check.  Brooke tried to solve the case of
who was the mysterious drug smuggler "Cobra".  She
later found that it was her own mother, Peg
English. The surprising revelation was that Brooke
had been adopted and was not Peg's daughter at
all.  When Brook found her real mother, a mentally
challenged homeless woman, Phoebe was launched
into a tear-jerking storyline begging Brooke not
to stop looking at her as a mother figure.

Warrick received Daytime Emmy Award nominations in
1975 and 1977.  In 1985, she played Hannah Cord in
the TV movie Return to Peyton Place.

For numerous reasons (most notable health
problems), Edmonds left All My Children in 1995
and his character bid a goodbye to his loving wife
to spend time on an archeological dig in Egypt. 
He died in 2001; his character was sent off to
Egypt until during Phoebe's funeral, the show made
a passing reference to Langley's death.. 
Langley's departure combined with Warrick's own
health problems from old age signaled a reduction
in her screentime in the 1990s.  

Warrick broke her hip while on vacation in Greece
in 2001 and had been confined to a wheelchair ever
since.

Head writer Richard Culliton was the last writer
to utilize her character in a major way. In 2002,
Phoebe schemed to get Brooke engaged to her true
love Edmund Grey (John Callahan). One of her lines
during this storyline was "They are happy...  and
they're going to be happy if it's the last thing I
do in my life."  This line lead to rumors that
Culliton was planning to kill off Phoebe amid
rumors that Warrick would be dropped from the show
for budget reasons (General Hospital later did
this to 90-year-old actress Anna Lee).

After this storyline collapsed due to Edmund's
wife coming back from the dead, Phoebe was not
seen on screen until All My Childrens 35th
anniversary show on January 5, 2005.  This brief
apearance would ultimately be Warrick's final
screen apearance.  When Warrick was wheeled into
the building the cast and crew gave her a standing
ovation to welcome her back to Pine Valley after
such a long absence.  This episode featured not
only a rare appearance from Warrick, but the
return of her step-daughter Verla played by
comedic legend Carol Burnett.  This episode also
featured Agnes Nixon playing "Agnes Eckhardt," a
board member of Pine Valley Hospital who shared
screentime with not only Warrick's Phoebe but also
Susan Lucci's Erica Kane, Jill Larson's Opal
Cortlandt, and other core characters.

She had three children from two of her three
marriages.  She has one grandson and six
great-grand children. Ruth Warrick published her
autobiography "The Confessions of Phoebe Tyler"
(co-written by Don Preston) in 1980, the same year
she won a Soapy Award (a prelude to the Soap Opera
Digest Awards).

She received a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame
and was on hand to receive her Daytime Emmy Award
for Lifetime Achievement in 2004.

Warrick was a member of the Democratic Party,
working with the administrations of John F.
Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter on labor
issues and preventing children from dropping out
of school. Upon Carter's U.S. presidential
election, 1980|1980 defeat, she sent him a long
letter thanking him for his efforts. He replied,
telling her that if he had hired her as a
speechwriter, he would have been reelected.
Warrick had generally liberal political views. In
her first years at All My Children, Warrick was
flustered by Phoebe's support of U.S. involvement
in the Vietnam War, which she adamantly opposed.
She decided to play the scenes as a "bubblehead,"
until producers warned her she would be fired if
she did not perform the scenes as written.
In July 2000, she refused to accept a lifetime
achievement award from the South Carolina Arts
Commission, because she was offended by
legislators' decision to move the confederate flag
from the state Capitol dome, to another spot on
the grounds in response to a boycott of the state
by flag opponents. A life-long supporter of
African-American rights, she felt the flag should
be removed completely, and commented "In my view,
this was no compromise. It was a deliberate
affront to the African-Americans who see it as a
sign of oppression and hate."

In her senior years, she became a spokeswoman for
the Rights of Senior Citizens as well as the
Disabled and was appointed to the U.N. World
Women's Committee on Mental Health.

She was the last living main cast member of
Citizen Kane.

She died of complications related to pneumonia. 
She received a memorial tribute at the 11th annual
Screen Actors Guild Awards.  The day after the
2005 Academy Award ceremony former cast-mate Kelly
Ripa expressed her outrage on her national
television show Live with Regis and Kelly that
Warrick has not been included in a similar tribute
by the Oscars.

The January 24, 2005 episode of All My Children
was dedicated "In Loving Memory of Ruth Warrick". 
Phoebe was killed off screen in May 2005.  With
Phoebe's passing the show finally addressed the
death of Louis Edmonds as Phoebe's last words were
reportly "Langley is waiting for me".  Phoebe's
funeral was aired May 12, 2005.  The episode
featured many of Warrick most notable performances
as flashbacks and included the return of many of
the characters who had been heavily involved in
her storylines over the years.  Many of the cast
commented to Soap Opera Digest that although the
episode was a funeral, it was surprisingly upbeat.
 Agnes Nixon again appeared on screen, albeit in
the background and only for a moment.  Julia Barr
ended the episode by raising a glass of champagne:
"To Phoebe, We love you, we'll miss you, but we'll
never forget you", followed by a montage of Phoebe
clips overdubbed with the song "I'll Be Seeing You
in all the old familiar places".

After her death her family put much of her estate
in an auction by http://www.dawsonandnye.com/ The
Dawson and Nye auction house. This auction
included her extensive collection of art and
photographs as well as books signed by former
United States President Bill Clinton and his wife
Hillary Clinton.  Signed scripts from Peyton Place
(TV series)|Peyton Place and All My Children as
well as her broadway appearances were also in the
catalog.  The centerpiece of the cataog was the
25th anniversary reprint script of Citizen Kane
signed by Warrick, Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles,
one of only 100 that were printed.  

Her family donated the Lifetime Achivement Emmy
Award she won in 2004 to a museum in her hometown
of Saint Joseph, Missouri.

== See Also ==

*Phoebe Tyler Wallingford
*Citizen Kane
*All My Children
*Peyton Place (TV series)|Peyton Place
*History of As the World Turns (1956-1959)
*History of All My Children (1970-1979)

== External links ==
*imdb name|id=0913095|name=Ruth Warrick 
*http://abc.go.com/daytime/allmychildren/bios/ruth
_warrick.html
*http://www.soapcentral.com/amc/theactors/warrick.
php
*http://alt.tcm.turner.com/MONTH_SPOTS/99/05/orson
_welles.htm
*http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/18/movies/18warr.h
tml?oref=login&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1106068615-KY6r8NK
u6+fjVXq4wF2mQg New York Times obituary
*http://www.dawsonandnye.com/ruth_warrick.html
Message from her son
*http://www.nj.com/search/index.ssf?/base/living-3
/1109428305224760.xml?starledger?life article
about the auction


===Video===
*http://pepper-fizz.net/bamie/amc-phoebe.wmv Ruth
Warrick's video obituary from ABC News
*http://www.emmyonline.org/emmy/ruth.html Tribute
by the National Academy of Television Arts and
Sciences

===Sources===
*http://moviediva.com/MD_root/reviewpages/MDCitize
nKane.htm
*http://www.ibdb.com/person.asp?ID=92535 listing
of her broadway credits