Name Patricia Duff Role Political activist | Children Caleigh Sophia Perelman | |
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Full Name Patricia Michelle Orr Movies About Last Night, D.C. Cab Similar People Ronald Perelman, Mike Medavoy, Claudia Cohen, Ellen Barkin, Edward Zwick | ||
Patricia Duff is an American political activist and a fundraiser for political and philanthropic causes.
Contents
Career
Duff founded a non-profit, non-partisan organization, The Common Good, in New York in 2007. The organization puts on forums, panels and special events to encourage greater citizen participation in civic life and the political process. Speakers have included national leaders and experts on public policy issues such as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski on foreign policy; Nouriel Roubini, Alan Blinder, Peter Peterson on economic issues; Governors Kathleen Sebelius and Ed Rendell; Senators Mitch McConnell and Amy Klobuchar on domestic issues, among many other speakers and topics.
Immediately after graduation from college, Duff first worked on the House Select Committee on Assassinations as Special Assistant to the Chief Counsel, Senior Researcher, and Public Information Officer. Duff then worked with former Presidential speech writer, John McLaughlin, to produce his live political talk radio show. She left to work for the re-election campaign of President Jimmy Carter at the Democratic National Committee and with presidential pollster Pat Caddell. Following her work on that campaign, she was made Vice President of Caddell's firm and worked on many political statewide campaigns and corporate marketing campaigns until she was hired by Bob Squier to join the Squier-Eskew consulting firm as Vice President.
After working on numerous senate and gubernatorial campaigns, Duff moved in 1984 to Los Angeles to work with the Gary Hart Presidential campaign. Duff was an activist in Democratic Party politics and a number of causes. She was regularly cited in The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times on politics. She was named a "Rising Star" by the Los Angeles Times in 1986 and one of the "Women we Love" by Esquire magazine for her work in politics as the "conscience" of the entertainment industry. The New York Social Diary called her "the most high profile entertainment industry-related female political figure in Los Angeles." Although a lifelong Democrat, Duff has also visibly supported Republicans, notably Richard Riordan for Mayor in Los Angeles and Michael Bloomberg for Mayor in New York.
In the late 1980s, Duff started an entertainment industry-related non-partisan political organization called Show Coalition, which became an important element in the nexus between Washington politics and Hollywood and the precursor to The Common Good.
Personal life
Duff was born in southern California, but grew up in Bonn, Germany and Brussels, Belgium, graduating from the International School of Brussels. Duff received a BSFS degree in International Economics at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and studied political science at Barnard College.
She has been married four times, first to high school sweetheart Thomas Zabrodsky in the late 1970s. She was then married to Washington, D.C. attorney Daniel Duff from 1980 to 1985, and then to Orion Pictures and later TriStar Pictures CEO Mike Medavoy from 1986 to 1994. After converting to Judaism, she was briefly married to businessman Ronald Perelman from 1995-1996 with whom she had a daughter, Caleigh, in December 1994.