Charita Bauer (December 20, 1922 – February 28, 1985) was an American soap opera actress. Born in Newark, New Jersey, 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 1984. While her character was a spitfire in the earlier days, by the 1970s she had been relegated to the ceremonial role of town matriarch. To avoid confusion between her real life and her popular soap role, Charita asked the show's producer's to name her TV son Michael after her own son Michael Crawford. (The show was filmed live in the early days, and a mistake like addressing her TV son by an incorrect name would have been difficult to cover.) Just before Thanksgiving 1983, complications from a blood clot forced her to have her leg amputated. When she returned to the show in March 1984, her character's life mirrored her own. After visiting Aunt Meta in New York, Bert returned to Springfield and began experiencing pain in her leg. She ended up having her leg amputated just as the actress who played her had. For the first time in decades, Bert had to depend upon others to wait on her hand and foot, resulting in one of the series' most memorable stories. (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.) In a moving scene, Bauer dropped a teacup. She tried to get it, but could not, and in sheer frustration, she burst into tears. Bauer was no stranger to social issue storylines -- in 1962, she became the first actress on daytime television to tackle a real-life medical dilemma, as Bert was diagnosed with uterine cancer. The storyline helped millions of women realize the importance of regular checkups and pap smear screenings. Bauer received a record amount of mail from fans. Bauer died of complications stemming from diabetes only weeks shy of her 35th anniversary on the show. She was 62 years old. She received a posthumous Lifetime Contribution Daytime Emmy Award that summer, along with "Search for Tomorrow's" Larry Haines and Mary Stuart (who in the 1990s played Meta Bauer). Her character Bert died in March 1986, a full year after Bauer died.
