Activist, Philanthropist. Born Nancy MacNeil, she grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., where her father was an accountant and her mother a homemaker. She met entertainment executive, Bob Daly, while she was a secretary at CBS and married him in 1961. They moved their family to Los Angeles where her role as entertainment executive's wife, along with her interest in the arts, brought her in contact with many of the city's elite. In 1979, she accompanied some of her industry acquaintances to a holiday party at MacLaren Children's Center in El Monte, California, and was deeply affected by the condition of the facility. She later went back with actor Henry Winkler, and soon helped found United Friends of the Children to aid youngsters in foster care. When her husband became chief executive at Warner Bros., she got him to dispense with the customary practice of sending expensive gifts to industry notables at Christmastime and instead to make contributions to MacLaren on their behalf, becoming one of the first studio executive families to do this. In 1984, she successfully lobbied for the creation of what is now the county Department of Children and Family Services and served on its advisory commission from the department's founding until 1999. She also worked to establish the county's Family Preservation Program and its committee. Daly also helped found the Children's Action Network, which sponsored briefings for the entertainment industry on children's issues and racked up a long record of lobbying in Sacramento and Washington for legislation to improve the lives of foster children. In 1989, she was appointed to the nonpartisan President's Commission on Children, which recommended federal government policy reforms. Around that time, she met future Los Angeles mayor, Richard Riordan, then a prominent lawyer, investment banker and philanthropist, and asked him to help pay for a computer reading lab for MacLaren. The Daly's divorced in 1991 and a couple of years later she called on Riordan again, to help bankroll an immunization program for children of low-income families. They soon became a couple but did not marry until 1998. Daly, who established herself as one of the country's most prominent activists on behalf of neglected or abused children, and had been battling pancreatic cancer, died while traveling back to Los Angeles from New York in a motor home with her three adult children.