Corinne Camacho was born with a name that could fit on a cathedral arch—Gloria Angelina Katharina Alletto, Passaic, New Jersey, 1941. But life has a way of reshaping people, sanding them down, renaming them until what’s left is a person who belongs to no single version of their past. By the time she was five, she and her parents were already on the other side of the country in Los Angeles, the city that teaches children early that reinvention is survival. She carried with her classical piano training from the Conservatory of Music and Arts, already building the bones of a musician long before she learned the grammar of performance.
The 1960s turned her into a West Coast fashion model, one of the top names in an era dripping with cigarette smoke, hairspray, and the relentless buzz of cameras. She married young, started a family, and when the runway lost its shine, she did what people with restless talent always do: she pivoted. In 1967 she began acting—a small choice that would carry her through the next thirty years.
Her first role came in The Wild Wild West: Artemus Gordon’s date, a small part that hinted at something bigger. Soon she was turning up everywhere television lived—the magical suburbs of Bewitched, the fantastical hijinks of I Dream of Jeannie, the gentle chaos of The Flying Nun. These were shows that shaped the American living room, and she slipped into them like she belonged.
Then came the heavier stuff—recurring roles on Medical Center, guest spots on the crime and drama staples of the day: Mannix, MASH*, Little House on the Prairie, The Rockford Files, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Waltons. These weren’t glamorous parts; they were the gears that made episodic television work. Camacho became one of those actors who carried stories quietly, dependably, drawing no attention and yet indispensable to the machinery.
Her most memorable stretch came as Joanne Barnes on Days of Our Lives, the kind of soap role that burns itself into fans’ memories even years later. She played it with that mix of control and vulnerability soaps demand—big emotions, real wounds disguised as weekly story arcs. After marrying Drew Michaels in 1974, she often worked under the name Corinne Michaels, another reinvention tucked into an already shapeshifting life.
But here’s where her story diverges from the usual Hollywood arc.
In 1996, instead of clawing for more roles, she walked away. She moved to New Mexico to build and run a hospice center—a place for endings, not performances. It takes a particular kind of courage to shift from fictional heartbreak to real human grief, to sit beside people in their final days and let go of everything your career taught you about artifice.
In 2001, she moved again—this time to Oregon, where she became a life coach, taught music, composed, recorded. She made a children’s album. She played piano, not for applause this time, but as a way to soothe and connect. And in 2006 she self-released Love Notes & Lullabies, an album she distributed by hand, the sort of thing artists do when the work matters more than the market.
She lived the kind of third act most creative people dream of—quiet, authentic, unsupervised by agents or expectations. And when cancer took her on September 15, 2010, at age 68, she left behind two children, two grandchildren, and the artistic DNA that now pulses through her niece, singer-songwriter Zoey Tess.
Corinne Camacho’s career wasn’t about fame. It was about motion—the way a person can keep evolving long after the world stops watching. She was a model, an actress, a pianist, a songwriter, a hospice founder, a life coach—roles that don’t add up to a tidy narrative, but which paint the picture of a woman who refused to let her life be defined by any single chapter.
If you track her through the decades, you see it clearly: she was never just one thing. She kept changing until the story felt true.
