Actress Deborah Raffin has died at the age of 59. Raffin passed away at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center after a year long battle with leukemia.
Years before her death, Raffin was running a successful audiobook company which was oftentimes helped along by her many celebrity friends.
Raffin’s death was revealed by her brother William who told the Los Angeles Times that she was diagnosed with the blood cancer approximately one year ago.
During her career, Deborah Raffin had roles in such movies as Forty Carats and Once Is Not Enough . On the TV front, Raffin starred as actress Brooke Hayward in Haywire and as a businesswoman in Noble House .
The actress and her former husband Michael Viner launched Dove Books-on-Tape in the mid-1980s. The business eventually turned into a multimillion-dollar venture that included such hits as Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.
With her connections in Hollywood, it was Raffin’s job to secure celebrity voices for her writers’ books. Viner and Raffin sold Dove Books-on-Tape in 1997. Viner died of cancer in 2008, eight years after the couple divorced.
Raffin is survived by her daughter, Taylor Rose Viner, and her brother and sister, William and Judy Holston.
The family of Deborah Raffin has planned services in Culver City, California on Sunday.
Our condolences go out to the entire Raffin family and their friends.
