Helen Gallagher has died.

Gallagher, a Broadway star who found wider fame playing Maeve Ryan on the ABC soap opera Ryan’s Hope from 1975 to 1989, died at the age of 98. Playbill announced the news in an Instagram tribute.

“We are saddened to report that two-time Tony winner Helen Gallagher has passed away at the age of 98,” the post read. “Our condolences go out to her family, friends, and fans.”

Edith Meeks, executive and artistic director at New York’s Herbert Berghof Studio, told The Washington Post the actress died on Sunday, Nov. 24 at a New York City hospital.

Gallagher was born in New York City in 1926 and grew up primarily in the Bronx. When her parents split, she and her brother lived with an aunt. She described herself as “nervous by nature,” but told The New York Times in 1971, “I was so shy, but on stage I was totally free, there was a sort of absolution there, to do what you couldn’t in life.”

Dancing was her first love. She made her Broadway debut in 1944 in the musical revue Seven Lively Arts after landing the gig because of her dancing prowess. Her first major breakthrough came in the 1952 revival of Pal Joey, for which she won her first Tony Award, for best featured actress in a musical.

She had her first starring role in 1953’s Hazel Flagg as the title character. “I was petrified the first week of rehearsals,” she told The New York Times in 1953. “After three days, I told my agent to get me out. I couldn’t do the role.”

“What do you do? You keep working. You work hard with the director and then you hit on something and you say, ‘Ah yes, this is good,’ and you’re started.”

She continued to work on Broadway for decades, in shows including Make a Wish, Portofino, High Button Shoes and Sweet Charity, for which she received another Tony nomination. When Gwen Verdon left the production, Gallagher stepped in as the title character.

Her second Tony came for her performance in the 1971 production of No, No, Nanette, this time for best actress in a musical. She also frequently made appearances on TV variety shows.

In 1975, she joined the soap opera Ryan’s Hope for its first season, playing Irish-American matriarch Maeve. Ryan’s Hope was unlike other soap operas in that it was set in a real place and real city — New York — and shied away from the more fantastical, over-the-top plots of other daytime dramas.

”The studio head thinks soap operas fulfill escapist fantasies of romance and glamor, but my theory is that a show like ours feeds other fantasies — about family closeness,” Gallagher told The New York Times in 1983. ”Maeve is caring, the mother figure who’s in there pitching on the side of the kids. In the soap, I’m a friend, I’m family.”

Gallagher stayed with the show until it was canceled in 1989 and won three Daytime Emmys for her role.

Gallagher also appeared in the 1977 film Roseland with Christopher Walken. In the 1990s, she appeared on two other soap operas, One Life to Live and All My Children.

But she considered herself a character actress and didn’t want to be a star. “I could have had a more high-powered career, but I never wanted to be anyone’s commodity,” she told The New York Times.

Beginning in the 1970s, Gallagher began teaching at the Herbert Berghof School, where she studied under Uta Hagen. She taught singing for the musical theater there, and in 2020 the school honored her by naming a performance space the Helen Gallagher Studio Theatre.

“HB Studio is my home, and teaching there has been one of the greatest joys of my life,” she said at the time, per the school’s website.

Gallagher married Frank Wise in 1956. Per their wedding announcement in The New York Times, they met when he was a stagehand for The Pajama Game.

Remembering their courtship in 1971, she told the Times, “He never spoke to me. Finally one night he said hello. I said, ‘My God, it talks!’ Well, that shut him up about a week, till one matinee he said, ‘You ever been to Versailles, the restaurant?’ I said, ‘No, you got any ideas who could take me?’ He said, ‘What are the qualifications?’ I said, ‘Oh, somebody who speaks English, somebody like you.’” That’s the kind of relationship it is, not made in heaven.”

Gallagher and Wise divorced in 1972.