Mary Stuart, the stalwart star throughout the 35-year run of the popular soap opera built around her character, “Search for Tomorrow,” has died.
Ms. Stuart, 75, who began as Joanne “Jo” Gardner Barron and ended the show as Joanne Gardner Barron Tate Vincente Tourneur, died Thursday at her New York City home of complications from a stroke.
Inducted into the Soap Opera Hall of Fame in 1995, Ms. Stuart also played the character Meta Bauer on another durable soap opera, “Guiding Light,” from 1996 until her death.
Born in Miami and raised in Tulsa, the future actress briefly attended the University of Tulsa and worked for three weeks as a cub reporter on the Tulsa Tribune. She was bounced, she later explained, because of a “chronic feud between myself and spelling authorities.”
But she also gravitated early to acting, working with the Tulsa Little Theater, a USO group and even singing with Count Basie’s orchestra when it came through town.
In her late teens, she hitchhiked to New York, where she became a photographer’s model and a nightclub photographer at the Roosevelt Grill before earning a movie contract with MGM.
Her true career began Sept. 3, 1951, when the daytime drama “Search for Tomorrow” hit the airwaves on CBS. When the show ended on NBC on Dec. 26, 1986, it was the longest-running soap opera on television.
Ms. Stuart was the first actress to be nominated for a daytime Emmy in 1962, and later added three more nominations. In 1983, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for her work on “Search for Tomorrow.”
