Ruth Warrick, 88, starred in "All My Children"

Ruth Warrick, the last surviving star of Orson Welles' film "Citizen Kane" and a fixture on the soap opera "All My Children," died of pneumonia Saturday at her home in New York. She was 88.

As Emily Norton Kane, the icy first wife of fictional publisher Charles Foster Kane, and then as the vain and vengeful Phoebe Tyler Wallingford on ABC's "All My Children," Ms. Warrick specialized in elegant, complicated matriarchs. As Wallingford, she was twice nominated for Daytime Emmy awards and was honored last May with an Emmy Award for lifetime achievement.

Ms. Warrick's casting in coldly intelligent roles belied a blunt, sometimes bawdy sense of humor. During one "All My Children" rehearsal, she approached a bored cameraman and flashed open her cape to reveal that she was topless.

"I do like to shock and surprise people," she once said. "When it's all in good fun, of course."

Ms. Warrick — who married and divorced five times — acknowledged affairs with actors Anthony Quinn and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. but was more circumspect about whether she consummated a relationship with Welles.

"I loved him," she told Time magazine in 1991. "It wasn't just a crush. I adored him, although I never let myself do anything about it. Orson sent for me a couple of times after the picture ended, and I did go one time, but I realized what the situation was and what he wanted from me and what would undoubtedly have happened.

"I was a married woman and I had a baby," she said. "I would have adored it, but I just couldn't do it because I'm a lady. But if you believe what Jimmy Carter says, that we sin in our hearts, then yes, I did."

But in another interview she acknowledged a fling with the director, attributing it to hero worship and a failing first marriage.

Ms. Warrick could be outlandish, outdoing all the pretensions at a diamond-studded Broadway opening by wearing a flamboyant crown. She also was a sincere Democratic political activist engaged in voter-registration drives. Moreover, she taught acting to poor black and Hispanic students in New York and helped start a job-training program in the Watts section of Los Angeles after riots there in the 1960s.

Ms. Warrick was born June 29, 1916, in St. Joseph, Mo., to a strict Baptist family.

She studied drama at what is now the University of Missouri at Kansas City, won a beauty contest in Kansas City and soon settled in New York, where her looks and mellifluous voice won her modeling and radio work. She found a job with Welles' radio acting company, Mercury Theater of the Air.

After "Citizen Kane," Ms. Warrick plodded along in ladylike roles that bored her. But there was some superior fare, notably Welles' "Journey Into Fear" (1943) and Disney's "Song of the South" (1946), in which she was the newly separated single mother.

In the early 1950s, she returned to New York, divorced a second time, raising two children and in need of work. Initially she was opposed to soaps, telling a producer, "Mrs. Citizen Kane do soap opera?" Still, she relented and appeared on "Guiding Light," "As the World Turns" and "Peyton Place," the last earning her an Emmy nomination playing enigmatic housekeeper Hannah Cord.

In 1970, she joined the original cast of "All My Children" and stayed with the show until her death.

Her marriages to Erik Rolf, Carl Neubert (they married twice), Robert McNamara (a television executive) and Jarvis Cushing Jr. ended in divorce. Survivors include two children with Rolf; a son with McNamara; a grandson; and six great-grandchildren.