Early Life
Duke was born in Elmhurst, Queens, New York, the youngest of three children born to Frances (née McMahon), a cashier, and John Patrick Duke, a handyman and cab driver. Her father was Irish American and her maternal grandmother was German.
Duke and her older brother, Raymond, and their older sister Carol experienced a childhood of hard times. Her father was an alcoholic, and her mother suffered from clinical depression and was prone to violence. When Duke was 6, her mother threw her father out; when she was 8, her mother turned Duke's care over to John and Ethel Ross, who became her managers. The Rosses recognized her talent and promoted her as a child actress.
The Rosses' methods of managing Duke's career were often unscrupulous and exploitive; they consistently billed Duke as being two years younger than she actually was, and padded her resume with some false credits. It was Ethel Ross who gave the sweeping name-change order, "Anna Marie is dead; you're Patty now." This was in hopes that the change in her first name would allow her to duplicate the success of child actress Patty McCormack. This act would have painful repercussions for Duke in the decades to come.
Read more about this topic: Patty Duke
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“...to many a mother’s heart has come the disappointment of a loss of power, a limitation of influence when early manhood takes the boy from the home, or when even before that time, in school, or where he touches the great world and begins to be bewildered with its controversies, trade and economics and politics make their imprint even while his lips are dewy with his mother’s kiss.”
—J. Ellen Foster (1840–1910)
“The man nearest my soul,
Who like a brother toiled in my affairs,
And laid his love and life under my foot.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)