Charita Bauer

[3] Bauer attended the Professional Children's School in New York, and her first theater appearance was on Broadway in Thunder on the Left (1933).

[9] She played headstrong and opinionated Bertha "Bert" Miller Bauer on the long-running soap The Guiding Light on radio from 1950 to 1956 and on TV from 1952 to 1985.

[2] In 1962, Bauer was featured in one of the earliest social issue storylines on American daytime television, as her character Bert was diagnosed with uterine cancer.

(The show was aired live in the early days, and a mistake like addressing her TV son by an incorrect name would have been difficult to cover.)

[2] In the storyline, after visiting Aunt Meta in New York, Bert returned to Springfield and began experiencing pain in her leg (which had been fitted with a prosthesis by this time and mostly kept off camera).

(Bert, sitting in a wheelchair at Cedars Hospital, told Josh Lewis, who had been paralyzed recently and had given up hope, that life itself was a miracle and never to forget it.)

As she went through rehab following her operation, camera shot closed in on her remaining leg as she learned to walk again, bringing even more realism to the storyline.