‘General Hospital’ and ‘AHS’ actress Barbara Tarbuck dies at 74
Barbara Tarbuck, a veteran actress mostly known for her performances on General Hospital and American Horror Story: Asylum, died Monday at age 74, the Associated Press reports.
Tarbuck’s daughter, producer Jennifer Lane Connolly, confirmed her death to the AP Thursday. Connolly said her mother died at her Los Angeles home and suffered from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disorder, a rare, degenerative brain disease.
Kicking off her career at age 9, the Detroit native acted on Storyland, a children’s series on AM radio station WWJ. She went on to score TV roles in Charlie’s Angels, Dallas, Cagney & Lacey, The Golden Girls, Mad Men, Dexter, and General Hospital, where she portrayed Jane Jacks over the span of 14 years. In addition to playing Mother Superior Claudia on AHS, Tarbuck performed in two other Ryan Murphy hits, Nip/Tuck and Glee.
Tarbuck also pursued a career on stage in regional and New York theater productions, work her daughter told the AP made her especially proud. Her projects included a Broadway production of Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs in the 1980s and Harold Pinter’s Landscape and Silence.
Tarbuck’s film highlights include performances in Big Trouble (1986), Short Circuit (1986), Curly Sue (1991), The Tie That Binds (1995) and Walking Tall (2004).
The actress’ education included studies at Wayne State University, the University of Michigan, and the London Academy of Music on a Fulbright Scholarship.
