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ABC soap opera actress remembered for award-winning Broadway performances.

Actress Pamela Payton-Wright, known to soap opera fans as One Life to Live’s Addie Cramer, passed away on December 14 at the age of 78 in Harmony, Pennsylvania.

Payton-Wright was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Eleanor Ruth (nee McKinley) and Gordon Edgar Payton-Wright on November 1, 1941. She went on to graduate from Tuscaloosa High School, Birmingham-Southern College and finally, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where she received the Special Medal and the Edmund Gray Prize for High Comedy. Crowned Miss Tuscaloosa in 1961, Payton-Wright went on to become a finalist in the Miss Alabama contest as well. She married David Arthur Butler in 1978 and together they had one son, Oliver Dickon Hedley Butler. The couple divorced in 1989.

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Pamela Payton-Wright was a renowned stage actress, who received a Drama Desk Award for her performance as Lavinia Mannon in the 1972 Broadway revival of Mourning Becomes Electra. She debuted on Broadway in The Show Off in 1967, and went on to appear in notable productions such as The Crucible, The Glass Menagerie, Romeo and Juliet, A Streetcar Named Desire, M. Butterfly, The Night of the Iguana, and Garden District. Her last role on Broadway came in 2003 as Mary Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. The actress, who also appeared in numerous off-Broadway productions, began her television and movie career in the early 1970s with small roles on hit series of the time including Gunsmoke and Bonanza. Her first daytime part was playing Hazel on Another World in 1979, but she was best known for her role as Addie Cramer on One Life to Live, which she held from 1995 – 2012. Her movie roles included Resurrection and The Freshman.

Payton-Wright is survived by her son Oliver Dickon Hedley Butler and his wife Cynthia Flowers, as well as brother Gordon Trafford Payton Wright, sisters Brenda Payton-Wright Davies and Barbara Payton-Wright Quackenbush, and her two nephews, Payton David Quackenbush and Peter Wright Quackenbush.

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Soaps.com extends condolences to Pamela Payton-Wright’s loved ones, friends and colleagues. Please feel free to browse the gallery below to remember other beloved soap actors we’ve lost this year.