Margaret "Peg" Phillips, who in her late 60s realized her dream of becoming an actress and then gained national recognition as general-store owner Ruth-Anne Miller on the CBS television series "Northern Exposure" from 1990 to 1995, has died. She was 84.
Phillips, a longtime smoker, died last Thursday of pulmonary disease in a suburban Seattle care center.
"I smoke, I eat lots of fat and red meat and don't exercise if I don't have to. This is the best time of life if you have your health, and I do," she told news media in Los Angeles in 1993 at a conference to introduce the fall television shows. Her priority, she added, was "living to be 90 ... 113, would you believe?"
But in 1995, she suffered a ruptured aorta and, in 1999, a broken hip and wrist when she was hit by a car. Earlier, as a Navy wife in 1941, she lived through the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and, in the 1950s, she conquered polio and peritonitis.
Over nearly 50 years, Phillips spent her spare moments acting in community theaters. But only at her retirement in the early 1980s did she return to Seattle and enroll at age 67 in the University of Washington.
Phillips found her signature role in 1990 when she was cast as the tart-tongued but kindly Miller in "Northern Exposure," a series starring Rob Morrow as a New Yorker working off his medical school expenses in Cicely, Alaska. The series was shot in rural Washington state not far from Phillips' 100-year-old farmhouse.
"I almost didn't audition for the series because ... I don't go out on little cookie-jar grandmother things," she said in 1992. "I don't have gray hair, I'm skinny and move too fast. I guess casting directors would see me more as a bag lady."
Envisioned as a minor recurring role, Ruth-Anne proved so popular that after 16 episodes she became a regular, wisely and calmly solving the fictional town's problems.
In 1993, she was nominated for an Emmy for best supporting actress.
Phillips is survived by two daughters, eight grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
No comments
Commenting is turned off for this story.