Paulette Breen

1947 - 2014

(News article) The public spotlight found Paulette Breen early, and at age 15 she became Miss Teen-Age Toledo - a "beauty queen," as pageant winners were called then.

Modeling and acting careers preceded work as a Hollywood producer for the graduate of Cardinal Stritch High School and Bowling Green State University.

Miss Breen, 67, who grew up in Rossford, died Oct. 29, 2014, in Providence Tarzana Medical Center in California, said her stepsister, Kathy Miller. The cause was cardiac-pulmonary arrest secondary to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and cancer of the throat.

Mrs. Miller only learned of the death several weeks ago when she received notice from California officials seeking Miss Breen's family and friends.

She had lived in Van Nuys, Calif. A Los Angeles Daily News article in May, 2012, detailed her struggle against foreclosure after getting caught in a mortgage scam.

Miss Breen's 2001 project, the television movie Haven, received awards. She was one of the executive producers for the story, based on the life of Ruth Gruber, a Jewish journalist who fought American anti-Semitism as she relocated Holocaust survivors to upstate New York. The cast included Natasha Richardson, Colm Feore, and Anne Bancroft.

It took five years of rejections before CBS picked up the drama, during which she was told the project was "too Jewish, too expensive, too big," she told The Blade in 2001. "I never gave up."

Other notable producer credits included the TV movies 83 Hours to Dawn and The Stranger Within from 1990.

"She was very focused, and she loved what she was doing," Mrs. Miller said. "She was an intense person and threw herself into it. She kept looking for future successes and stuck with it."

In New York, she was cast in 1970 on All My Children, but she soon struck out for Hollywood. For much of the 1970s and 1980s, she had TV roles - Wonder Woman, Happy Days, Quincy, ME. She made a decision after losing a series role to the producer's girlfriend.

"I was so mad about that," she told The Blade in 1988. "I decided that I had the ability to produce these shows. An actress is controlled. A producer is [in] control. That's what I wanted to be."

She was born Oct. 29, 1947, to the former Margaret Horvath and Gilbert Breen. After her parents divorced, she and her mother moved to Rossford. Her mother, who had been a dancer on the New York stage, encouraged Miss Breen in the performing arts.

As Miss Teen-Age Toledo of 1962, Miss Breen was a semifinalist in the Miss Teen-Age America Pageant, but she won the talent division for her acrobatic ballet. She was 1966 queen of the Ohio New Photographers Association, third runner-up in the 1967 Miss Ohio pageant, and 1971 Miss Illinois USA. She'd gone to Chicago after BGSU, she told The Blade in 1988, to go into advertising and public relations. Unable to find a job, she went into modeling.

Survivors include her stepsister, Kathy Miller, and two first cousins, Robert McAlister, son of her mother's sister Julie, and AnnMarie Mussolini, daughter of her mother's brother Joe Horvath.

Memorial services will be at 10 a.m. Saturday at All Saints Church in Rossford. The family suggests tributes to Cardinal Stritch High School, Oregon, or All Saints Church, Rossford.

This story was written by Blade Staff Writer Mark Zaborney. Contact him at: mzaborney@theblade.com or 419-724-6182.