Ruth Warrick, who died Saturday at her Manhattan apartment, started out her acting career with a splash as Emily Norton Kane – the icy first wife in “Citizen Kane”- and ended it with a 35-year stint as the formidable Phoebe Tyler Wallingford on “All My Children.”

Warrick made her final appearance as the boozy harridan of Pine Valley in a special 35th anniversary episode on January 5 that also featured a guest appearance by Carol Burnett, reprising the role of Verla, Phoebe’s stepdaughter. Warrick had been with the show since its inception, and although she had retired several years ago, she continued to make occasional special appearances, the last in a wheelchair.

She was so wedded to her long-running role that she published her autobiography as “The Confessions of Phoebe Tyler.”

That Warrick would wind up among the doyennes of daily drama would have seemed unlikely earlier in her career. When she first took a soap opera role, as a promiscuous nurse on “The Guiding Light” in 1953, “People said, ‘My God, Ruth, you’ve ruined your career. How can Mrs. Citizen Kane be on a soap?'” Warrick told People magazine in 1989.

Warrick grew up in Missouri and came to New York as a young actress in 1937, fresh out of the University of Kansas City. She supported herself with modeling and occasional radio jobs, and soon met and married Erik Rolf, a radio announcer. She met Orson Welles while performing in one of his Mercury Theater productions. When Welles went to Hollywood to make “Citizen Kane” in 1940, she was one of several veterans of the show who were cast.

Prior to playing Mrs. Kane, the Washington Post breathlessly reported, the most publicity Warrick had garnered was as Turkey Queen of St. Joseph, Mo.

Although relations between Mr. and Mrs. Kane are extremely strained in the film, Warrick got on famously with Welles, and she told various stories about having an affair with him, or refraining from doing so. “I was a married woman and I had a baby,” she told People in 1991.”I would have adored it, but I just couldn’t do it, because I’m a lady. But if you believe what Jimmy Carter says, that we sin in our hearts, then yes I did.”

As a contract player with RKO during the 1940s,Warrick was cast in a succession of roles as “the wife” – relatively predictable leads in solid melodramas, most of which have been forgotten. Among the highlights was “The Corsican Brothers,” a 1941 adventure film featuring Douglas Fairbanks Jr. as a separated Siamese twin. Another was “China Sky” (1945), in which she played a doctor in a remote Chinese village in wartime. Anthony Quinn played a guerilla leader.

Warrick admitted to on-set affairs with both Fairbanks and Quinn, and by 1945 her first marriage had ended, although she and Rolf would both do voice work in the Walt Disney film “Song of the South” in 1946. She remarried in 1950 to Danish interior decorator Carl Neubert, but the union soon floundered over issues involving her children. Warrick was married and divorced five times in all, including twice to Neubert. “She did pick a lot of lemons,” a friend told People.

Like many female stars approaching their mid-30s, Warrick began finding her choice of roles more limited. Her last film during her Hollywood years was the forgettable “Roogie’s Bump” (1954) about a kid with a medical condition who is allowed to pitch in the major leagues.

In 1952, Warrick moved back to New York for a change of career. She had a unique pioneering role in the history of television. In 1939, she performed a spiel about the possibilities of TV for the first in-house transmission in the RCA building. “I remember the lights were, gosh, awful,” Warrick said. “I got burns on my face, that’s how strong they were.”

Fifteen years later, Warrick readily found roles in television. In addition to “Guiding Light,” she was cast on “As the World Turns” and later on “Peyton Place,” for which she received an Emmy nomination in 1967.

She appeared on Broadway in “Take Me Along,” a 1959 musical version of Eugene O’Neill’s “Ah, Wilderness,” headlined by Jackie Gleason and Walter Pidgeon. Warrick also appeared in a number of roles in regional theater, and she did a national tour as Anna in “The King and I.”

Warrick was active in Democratic politics, and in the early 1960s served as a “school drop-out consultant” to the Kennedy Labor Department. After the 1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles, Warrick helped found Operation Bootstrap, a storefront job-training program. She frequently lectured to school groups in support of arts education programs, and during the 1970s she taught at Julia Richman High School in Manhattan as part of President Carter’s “City in the Schools” program.

Warrick also sat on the Board of Regents of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Having made peace with her single hood in later middle age, she sought tranquility in gardening and meditation at her old captain’s house at Cape Cod. She also boasted of being a licensed metaphysical teacher, having received certification from the Unity School of Practical Christianity in Lees Summit, Mo.

Starting in the late 1960s, Warrick again began appearing in films, but mainly in smaller roles. Then she was cast as Phoebe in “All My Children” in 1970. Phoebe was imperious, notoriously refusing at one point to allow her chauffeur to step into her library clad in blue jeans. Warrick saw some of herself in Phoebe, and indeed was known for occasional outbursts when not correctly acknowledged at a formal dinner or when sets malfunctioned. Other times, she was just the opposite, and was known for occasionally flashing her chest at crewmembers to keep things on the set lively; no doubt she affected great joie de vivre. She told People, “I’ll probably be the only person with a tombstone that says, ‘Thank You.'”

Ruth Warrick

Born June 29, 1916, in St. Joseph, Mo.; died January 15 at her home in Manhattan of pneumonia; survived by her children, Karen Langenwalter, Jon Rolf, and Robert McNamara, a grandson, and six great-grandchildren.