Marilyn Chris

Marilyn Chris (born Marilyn Miller, 1938 or 1939[a]) is an American actress, possibly best known as Wanda Webb Wolek on the ABC soap opera, One Life to Live.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, to Jack Miller, an English-Scottish Mennonite and Sylvia Slavin, a Russian Jew, Chris attended the High School of Performing Arts and City College of New York.

She began her acting career in the 1950s at The Living Theatre. Prompted by the discovery that her birth name was already registered with Actors Equity, Miller devised a stage name simply by shortening her then-married name, Christopoulos.

With appearances on television shows such as NBC's Law & Order and Fame, she is known by longtime soap fans as Wanda Wolek #1 on the ABC soap opera, One Life to Live, a role she played from 1972 through 1976, and from 1980 through 1994. Earlier in her career she played Edie Hoffman on the ABC soap opera All My Children.

She has appeared in such films as Love With The Proper Stranger (1963), The People Next Door (1970), The Honeymoon Killers (1970), The Black Marble (1980), and Trees Lounge (1996).

She has also acted and directed for the theater. Her Broadway credits include roles in Lenny and Brighton Beach Memoirs.[10] She received an Obie Award and a Drama Desk Award and an Outer Critics Circle Award and a Variety Critics Poll for her performance in Kaddish, directed by Robert Kalfin at the Chelsea Theater Center.[11]

Chris has married three times, the first two ending in divorce: first, in 1957, to aspiring playwright George Christopoulos, with whom she had a son, Paul;[12] next, on New Year's Eve 1967, to actor Ric Mancini;[13][14] and finally—from December 14, 1975 until his death on December 20, 2020—to actor Lee Wallace.[15]