Marnie Schulenburg, a soap opera actress who documented her journey from first-time mother to cancer patient, has died after battling stage 4 metastatic breast cancer, according to her representative.
I was 37 years old.
Marnie Schulenburg in 2007
Schulenburg, who played Alison Stewart on “As the World Turns” and Jo Sullivan on “One Life to Live,” died Tuesday, her manager Kyle Luker told Citizen Free Press.
Marnie Schulenburg and her husband, “Succession” actor Zack Robidas, welcomed their daughter, Coda, two years ago.
In December 2020, Schulenburg wrote about her diagnosis for the Soaps site.
“On the eve of my 36th birthday, instead of looking for a place to drink several Bloody Marys (my birthdays always involve Bloody Marys, boats and lobster, in no particular order), I was repeating the same question over and over again. in my head: ‘How do you celebrate a birthday with a new baby in the midst of a global pandemic while accepting a diagnosis of stage IV, borderline, metastatic, triple-negative inflammatory breast cancer?'” she wrote.
Marnie Schulenburg, a former gymnast, grew up in Barnstable, Massachusetts, and told The Morning Call in 2012 that her plans to attend school in Boston were derailed after her older brother Gus, a published playwright, took her to his soul. mater, DeSales University, where he fell in love with the campus.
She also found another kind of love at school, because there he met Robidas, who was his campus guide.
Marnie Schulenburg pursued acting while in school, landing the part in “As the World Turns” the year she graduated, in 2006.
She then appeared in the web version of the soap opera, “One Life to Life,” in 2013.
Schulenburg, who would have celebrated his 38th birthday on Saturday, has also performed on Broadway and appeared in television series including “Blue Bloods” and most recently Showtime’s “City on a Hill.”
She shared her fight with cancer on social media, writing in a Mother’s Day post on her verified Instagram account earlier this month that she had been sent home from the hospital on oxygen.
“It’s not my ideal to be a 38-year-old mom who needs an oxygen tank to survive right now. I want to be strong and beautiful for her,” she wrote in the caption of a series of pictures showing her daughter and her own mother, Candace. “I want to show her how to move through this world with compassion, strength, vivacity, humor and joy like my mother showed me.”