Patricia Barry, Stalwart of Daytime Soap Operas, Dies at 93

Patricia Barry, the veteran actress of stage and screen who was a standout on such soap operas as Days of Our Lives, All My Children and Guiding Light, has died. She was 93.

Barry, one of the earliest members of Women in Film and a former president of the nonprofit advocacy organization, died peacefully Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles, her publicist announced.

In the movies, Barry starred in Send Me No Flowers as the soon-to-be divorced neighbor whom Doris Day suspects is having an affair with her husband Rock Hudson, and she played Glenn Ford’s former mistress in Delbert Mann’s Dear Heart. Both films were released in 1964.

Also that year, Barry appeared in the crime drama Kitten With a Whip (1964), starring Ann-Margret, and starred as Jack Klugman’s spendthrift wife on the short-lived NBC sitcom Harris Against the World.

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On NBC’s Days of Our Lives, Barry portrayed Addie Horton Williams, who was married to the character played by Bill Hayes, from 1971-74. She then had a rather interesting turn as Peg English — who raised her adopted daughter Brooke (Julia Barr) while running an international drug cartel under the alias The Cobra — on ABC’s All My Children from 1980-81.

On CBS’ Guiding Light from 1984-87, Barry sparkled as the conniving Southern belle “Miss Sally” Gleason, then played upper-crust matriarch Isabelle Alden on the ABC soap Loving in the ‘90s.

Patricia White was born Nov. 16, 1922, in Davenport, Iowa. Her father was a doctor who cared for rural families, and her mother was the youngest of 14 children. She attended Stephens College in Columbia, Mo., where she trained with Maude Adams — who played Peter Pan on Broadway in 1905 — and then studied under Sanford Meisner in New York.

Her first professional role came in a 1944 production of Laughing Water, by Henry and Phoebe Ephron (the parents of Nora and Delia), and she soon appeared on Broadway in Calico Wedding. Later, she was Steve Allen’s co-star in The Pink Elephant. 

She won a Rita Hayworth look-alike contest, was signed by Warner Bros. and made her big-screen debut as a showgirl in Her Kind of Man (1946). She went on to appear in such films as The Beast With Five Fingers (1946); Joan Crawford’s Humoresque (1946); The Man I Love (1947) with Robert Alda and Ida Lupino; The Wreck of the Hesperus (1948); Gene Autry’s Riders of the Whistling Pines (1949); The Tattooed Stranger (1950); and First Love (1954).

She co-starred with William Frawley, Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Whitey Ford and other New York Yankees in the spring-training-set Safe at Home! (1962).

Barry starred in two episodes of The Twilight Zone and showed up on such series as Perry Mason, Rawhide, Gunsmoke, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Thriller, Route 66, My Three Sons, Three’s Company, Dallas, Murder, She Wrote and PBS’ Ghostwriter, where she played a movie star.

An astute businesswoman, Barry leased fully furnished homes to visiting stars, directors and other dignitaries in Los Angeles and New York. Her tenants included Peter Ustinov, Paul Newman & Joanne Woodward, Angela Lansbury, Paula Prentiss & Richard Benjamin, Joshua Logan, Don Rickles and Peter Gallagher. George Roy Hill was living in her house on Beverly Drive when he directed his Oscar-winning Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969).

Barry, who had a fondness for Yorkshire Terriers, was the recipient of Women in Film’s prestigious Founder’s Award in 1999. In 2004, she starred in Martha Mitchell Speaks, a one-woman show in New York produced by Dorothea Petrie.

Her husband, Philip Barry Jr., who produced plays, films (The Mating Game) and telefilms for ABC, died in 1998. He was the son of playwright Philip Barry, and after her husband’s death, she authorized all productions of Philip Barry plays, including stagings in London of High Society and The Philadelphia Story, starring Kevin Spacey.

Survivors include her daughters Miranda Barry, a former executive in charge of global Sesame Street productions, and Stephanie; son-in-law Mark; grandchildren Alixanne and Hailey; and godchildren Tracy and Stephen.

Memorial services are planned for early 2017 in Los Angeles and New York.