Kay Campbell; Veteran Soap Opera Actress

Kay Campbell, a veteran radio and television actress who for the last 15 years played Kate Martin in the ABC-TV soap opera “All My Children,” has died of injuries suffered in an automobile accident.

Miss Campbell, born Catherine Hibben, died Monday at Greenwich Hospital, where she had been hospitalized since the accident in Greenwich, Conn., on May 11. She was 80.

Police quoted her as saying she passed out shortly before her car collided head-on with another car in Greenwich. Two other people also were injured in the accident.

A charter member of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists and a member of the Screen Actors Guild, Miss Campbell began her broadcasting career in Chicago in 1935 after two years as a fashion model. On radio, she acted on “Helen Trent,” “Backstage Wife,” “Story of Mary Marlin,” “Myrt and Marge,” “Lucky Girl,” “Painted Dreams” and “Lonely Women,” a wartime saga of women whose men had gone into military service.

For 15 years, until the program’s demise in 1960, she was Evey Perkins Fitz, the snippy and gossiping daughter on “Ma Perkins,” which in its 27-year run was perhaps radio’s best known romantic drama. Like a number of other serial dramas of the era, it was sponsored by a laundry soap--in this case Oxydol--and it helped give the nation the sobriquet “soap” to describe the genre that continues today on television.

Miss Campbell moved to New York in 1946, where “Ma Perkins,” “Just Plain Bill” and “Front Page Farrell” were broadcast and then shifted to television. She played Mrs. Benedict in “Guiding Light” and Rose Pollock in “Edge of Night.” She also was the hostess of “The Armstrong Circle Theatre” from 1950 to 1954.

She is survived by a son, Samuel E. Hibben of Fullerton; four grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.