Imbued with the spirit of doing good while growing up as the only child of a single mother in Florida, Ann Lurie would, in a most energetic and self-effacing fashion, become one of the most prolific philanthropists in the history of this city. Her name and that of her husband Robert, who died in 1990, are affixed most prominently to Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago.
But there have been dozens of other beneficiaries in Chicago and across the world, fueled by Robert Lurie’s success in business but also by Ann Lurie’s deeply altruistic nature. “When I was young, my mother encouraged me to ‘do a good deed daily,’” she said some years ago. “Following her advice as a teenager gave me a great deal of personal pleasure, and now, many years later, it still feels good.
” Lurie, 79, died early Monday at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where she had been under hospice care for some time. She was suffering from glioblastoma. Over her last weeks she had been visited by members of her small circle of close friends and by her family: her husband filmmaker Mark Muheim and her six adult children from her marriage to Robert Lurie, along with their partners and children.
Ann Lurie born in Florida, the only child of Marion Elizabeth Blue, a Canadian who worked as a nurse. Her father abandoned the family when Ann was 4 and she was raised in a middle-class Miami household by her mother, grandmother and an aunt. Influenced by her mother’s profession, she aspire.
