American actress Marnie Schulenburg was best known for playing Alison Stewart in the CBS soap series As the World Turns.
What is known of Marnie Schulenburg’s early life?
Marnie Schulenburg, who was of German ancestry, was born on May 21st, 1984, in Cape Cod in Massachusetts. She has an older brother named Allan who teaches music and an older sister named Corinna who writes plays. In 2002, she received her diploma from Barnstable High School.
She earned a bachelor’s degree in drama from DeSales University in Center Valley, Pennsylvania, in May 2006. She relocated to New York City in September 2006, when she began acting part auditions. Before making her television debut, the one-time gymnast also became a member of the Dramatists Guild of America, where she engaged in play readings and The Flux Theatre Ensemble.
Who was Marnie Schulenburg’s husband?
On September 15, 2013, Schulenburg wed her actor lover of ten years, Zack Robidas. On December 12, 2019, she gave birth to their daughter Coda Jones.
When Zack Robidas, a fellow actor, first came to the DeSales University campus, Marnie Schulenburg had never met him. His college tour guide was her. According to The Morning Call, she had followed her brother Gus, a published writer who had driven Marnie to the school for auditions. Although Schulenburg and Robidas clicked, they didn’t start dating until a year later. Then they were both cast members of the university play The Trojan Women.
How did Marnie Schulenburg start her acting career?
Schulenburg got casted in the role of Alison Stewart in 2006. On February 22, 2007, the character made a crossover cameo on The Young and the Restless, and the following month, Schulenburg made her television debut on As the World Turns. The show was based set in the town of Oakdale, Illinois, which was actually fictional and the Hughes, Snyder, and Walsh families who have a strong presence in the town. They have a long history and many of the different family members and friends find it difficult to act morally while following their feelings.
Digital Daytime: L.A.Diaries, a short internet soap opera, starred Schulenburg and Adrienne Frantz as actors. As the World Turns’ Alison was her longest-serving character and she was the longest tenured actor for the role. Schulenburg stayed with the show until its very last episode which was aired on September 17 of 2010. In 2010, Schulenburg was nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award in the category of Outstanding Younger Actress in a Drama Series for her portrayal of Alison. She participated in a virtual cast reunion that Alan Locher moderated in April 2020.
In the love story Made for Each Other, Schulenburg made her acting debut (2009). She also appeared on various television shows as guest roles. In the final two episodes of the first season of the Alpha House series on Amazon Prime Video, she played Crystal. During three episodes of the series Royal Pains, Schulenburg was casted as Sherry Tanner. She participated in the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival in 2011 in stage productions such as As You Like It (2006) and South Pacific. She was also seen in the 2011 documentary One Night Stand with Rachel Dratch, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, and Cheyenne Jackson.
She was given the role of Jo Sullivan in the ABC serial drama One Life to Live in 2013. She started playing the aspiring actress Peyton Adams in Tainted Dreams in 2014 after the show’s December 30, 2013, YouTube launch before moving exclusively to Amazon and Amazon Prime. It is a soap-within-a-soap that Sonia Blangiardo created and which chronicles the intrigue behind the scenes of the fictitious soap opera Painted Dreams. She appeared as Stacy on an episode of CBS’s The Good Fight in April 2019.
What was the cause of Marnie Schulenburg’s early demise?
Schulenburg stated in May 2020 that she had been given a metastatic breast cancer diagnosis, which medical professionals mistakenly believed to be the usual mastitis that affects new mothers. It is the most devious type of breast cancer, inflammatory breast cancer, is defined as being more aggressive, younger women are affected, and disguise itself as a nursing infection in new mothers. It doesn’t appear like conventional breast cancer and is more aggressive. In an emotional Instagram post, she asked how does one celebrate a birthday after being diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer in the midst of a worldwide pandemic while caring for a 5-month-old?
For her medical expenditures, her friends and family put up a GoFundMe campaign, and in October 2020, the $75,000 target was reached. She was 37 years old when she passed away from the illness in a hospital in Bloomfield, New Jersey.
Marnie is survived by Zack Robidas, an actor, and Coda, Marnie’s 2-year-old daughter. The “Succession” actor claimed that because his wife had battled so valiantly for her life, it was improper to refer to her death as a defeat.
It is absolutely untrue, Zack stated in a Facebook post, to say that Marnie lost her battle with cancer. He talks about how he has seen her battle cancer every day since it was diagnosed. Marnie was amazing, he said, and they had made the decision to approach her diagnosis with naive optimism. He is unsure if what they did was right, but it was all they knew how to do. They only talked about the future and carried on.
The “As the World Turns” actress was able to return home from the hospital less than two weeks before she passed away to celebrate Mother’s Day with her daughter, but she was concerned that she was only giving the young girl a half-life version of herself. She said on Instagram that there was no certainty she would be able to spend Mother’s Day at home and that she had to be brought home with an oxygen machine after being released late at night.
The actress wrote that it was not her ideal to be a 38-year-old mother who need an oxygen tank to survive in her final Instagram post. Marnie went on to state that she wished to show for her daughter how to walk through the world with kindness, strength, vivacity, humour, and joy, just as her mother had done for her. She admitted that the greatest gift she could have given her daughter at that point was simply being there for her, but she felt like it was settling because she was getting a diminished version of herself.