Actress Marnie Schulenburg dead at 37
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Lisa Respers France, CNN
(CNN) — Marnie Schulenburg, a soap opera actress who documented her journey from becoming a new mother to a cancer patient, has died after battling stage 4 metastatic breast cancer, according to her representative.
She was 37.
Schulenburg, who played Alison Stewart on “As the World Turns” and Jo Sullivan on the “One Life to Live” reboot, died Tuesday, her manager Kyle Luker told CNN.
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 searching for a place to drink multiple Bloody Marys (my birthdays always involve Bloody Marys, boats and lobster, not in any particular order), I was repeating the same question over and over again in my head: “How does one celebrate a birthday with a new baby in the middle of a global pandemic while coming to terms with a Stage IV, metastatic, borderline triple negative inflammatory breast cancer diagnosis?'” she wrote.
A former gymnast, Schulenburg 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 alma mater, DeSales University, where she fell in love with the campus.
She also found another type of love at the school, meeting Robidas there when she served as his campus guide.
Schulenburg acted while in school and snagged the role on “As the World Turns” the year she graduated in 2006.
She went on to appear on the web reboot of “One Life to Life” in 2013.
Schulenburg, who would have celebrated her 38th birthday on Saturday, also performed off Broadway and appeared in television series, including “Blue Bloods” and most recently Showtime’s “City on a Hill.”
She shared her struggle with cancer on social media, writing on 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 on a series of photos that featured her daughter and her own mother, Candace. “I want to show her how to move throughout this world with compassion, strength, vivacity, humor and joy like my Mother showed me.”