Meet Cathy, who has lived most everywhere, and Patty, who has only seen the sights a girl can see from Brooklyn Heights. If you can still hum the rest, you know how it ends: they’re cousins, identical cousins all the way. ABC premiered The Patty Duke Show on September 18, 1963, and for three seasons a 16-year-old Oscar winner played both girls, switching from Cathy’s proper manners to Patty’s rock and roll chatter within a single scene.
The series ran 104 episodes before it signed off in 1966, and it was built around one family at the dinner table in Brooklyn Heights. Five actors made up that family on screen, and all five came back together for a 1999 reunion movie. Then 2016 took three of them in less than seven months. Here is what happened to each member of the main cast, and who is still with us today.
Is Jean Byron Still Alive?
Jean Byron played Natalie Lane, the calm and patient mother who could talk Patty down from almost any scheme. She was born Imogene Audette Burkhart in Paducah, Kentucky, on December 10, 1925, and she changed her name when she signed with Columbia Pictures because the studio did not care for Burkhart. Her real name came back to her in 1959, when The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis cast her as a character called Dr. Imogene Burkhart, and she often played opposite the show’s weary teacher, Mr. Pomfritt. That teacher was William Schallert, who would soon be her television husband.
After the Lane family broke up in 1966, Byron kept working as a guest star on shows like Batman, Maude and Hotel. She had been married briefly to actor Michael Ansara in the 1950s. By the late 1980s she had stepped away from acting and moved to Mobile, Alabama, with her aging mother to be near family, though she came back one last time for the 1999 reunion film The Patty Duke Show: Still Rockin’ in Brooklyn Heights.
Jean Byron died on February 3, 2006, in Mobile at age 80. According to Variety, she developed an infection following hip replacement surgery. She was the first member of the main cast to go, and for ten years the rest of the Lanes remained.
Is Patty Duke Still Alive?
Patty Duke was born Anna Marie Duke in New York City on December 14, 1946, and by the time the show began she had already won an Academy Award for playing Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker. She was 16. Sidney Sheldon, who created the series with William Asher, built it around her and even put her name in the title, and the gimmick of two look-alike cousins meant she was carrying the workload of two leads every week.
She had a clear favorite between them. “I liked Cathy better,” she confessed to Susan King of the Los Angeles Times in 2013. “Patty was very embarrassing to me,” she added, laughing. The writers handed Patty all the outrageous stunts, she explained, and “I would dive in and do it, but I couldn’t wait to get to Cathy.” The same interview held a darker note. Duke described her managers of those years, John and Ethel Ross, as “very misguided people,” and the Associated Press later reported that they had supplied the young star with alcohol and prescription drugs while her bipolar disorder went undiagnosed.
The years after the show brought three Emmy Awards, including one for My Sweet Charlie in 1970, along with four marriages and a son who grew up to be the actor Sean Astin. She served as president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1985 to 1988. After her bipolar diagnosis in the early 1980s she told her story in the memoir Call Me Anna and became an outspoken advocate for people living with mental illness, a part of her life her son has carried forward, as we wrote when looking at Patty Duke’s three children.
Patty Duke died on March 29, 2016, in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, at age 69. Her agent said the cause was sepsis from a ruptured intestine. “We’re so grateful to her for living a life that generates that amount of compassion and feeling in others,” Sean Astin told the Associated Press. Her TV father would follow her only weeks later.
Is William Schallert Still Alive?
William Schallert played Martin Lane, the patient father who had to keep two teenage girls straight under one roof. He also turned up as Cathy’s father, Kenneth, in a few early episodes, so for a while he had a double role of his own. Duke never forgot what he meant to her on that set. “He’s the dad I never got to spend time with,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 2013.
Born in Los Angeles on July 6, 1922, Schallert was the son of a Los Angeles Times critic, and he almost never stopped working. Before the Lanes he was Mr. Pomfritt on Dobie Gillis, trading scenes with the same Jean Byron who would later play his wife. After them came a long run of guest parts, including Nilz Baris in the Star Trek episode “The Trouble With Tribbles.” He also served as president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1979 to 1981, and he was proud that the guild set up committees for older performers. “I’m a big beneficiary of that right now because I’m 85 and I still work,” he said in a 2008 interview quoted by CBS News.
He meant it. His last television appearance came in 2014, a small part on 2 Broke Girls, when he was in his nineties. William Schallert died at his home in Pacific Palisades, California, on May 8, 2016, at age 93, just six weeks after the girl he had played father to for three seasons. His son Edwin announced the death.
Is Eddie Applegate Still Alive?
Every teenage sitcom heroine needs a long-suffering boyfriend, and Eddie Applegate was Patty’s. He played Richard Harrison, Patty’s high school sweetheart, and Bloomberg reported that he appeared in 88 of the show’s 104 episodes. Born in Wyncote, Pennsylvania, on October 4, 1935, he came up through summer stock and was performing in Bye Bye Birdie when he was cast in the 1963 film A Ticklish Affair with Shirley Jones and Gig Young.
After the show he worked steadily as a guest star, with stops on The Lucy Show, Gunsmoke and Daktari, plus a recurring part on Nancy, a short-lived comedy that also came from Sidney Sheldon. When the cast reunited in 1999, Richard came back as Patty’s ex-husband, which told fans that the high school romance had made it to the altar and then fallen apart. He kept acting into his seventies, playing a grandfather in Easy A in 2010 and making his final film, Rain From Stars, in 2013. Away from the cameras he also worked as an agent and a carpenter, and he took up painting, calling himself a “Realist to Impressionist painter” on his own website.
Eddie Applegate died on October 17, 2016, at a nursing home in Los Angeles after what a friend called a long illness. He was 81. He was the third member of the main cast lost that year, and it left just one of the Lanes’ household still with us.
Is Paul O’Keefe Still Alive?
Yes. Paul O’Keefe, who played Patty’s kid brother Ross Lane, is the only surviving member of the show’s main cast, and he turned 75 on April 27, 2026. He was already a Broadway veteran when the show began. At 7 he played little Winthrop Paroo in The Music Man on Broadway in 1959, and he grew up performing around Boston before studying at the New England Conservatory of Music.
Ross was the role that made him famous, and he followed it with the 1966 film The Daydreamer, along with guest parts on My Three Sons and the 1970s children’s series Hot Hero Sandwich. Music turned out to be his second act. About a year into the original Broadway run of Rent, a friend who was the show’s musical supervisor invited him to sit in, and he went on to play guitar and keyboards for the production. Years later he served as assistant musical director and assistant conductor for the show’s 20th anniversary tour.
When that tour reached Boston in 2019, he told Metro what he thought kept the musical alive. “One of the things I think is more useful and important at this time is the notion of family,” he said. “The show has always had that theme and is one of the things that I think keeps the show relevant.” He was talking about Rent, but he might as well have been describing the Lanes.
He has stayed close to that second family. In October 2026, BroadwayWorld listed him among the alumni scheduled for a Rent reunion panel at New York’s Museum of Broadway. Sixty-three years after he first sat down at the Lane family table, the kid brother from Brooklyn Heights is the one still here to tell the story.
