Patricia Elliott was born July 21, 1938 in Gunnison, Colorado to Clyde and Lavon (née Gibson) Elliott. She claimed direct descent from President Ulysses S. Grant, John Winthrop (first governor of Massachusetts) and Mary Lyon (founder of what would become Mount Holyoke College). She graduated from South High School, Denver. Patricia Elliott graduated from the University of Colorado in 1960 and worked at the Cleveland Play House, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., among others. Patricia Elliott began her career in 1968 with the science fiction film The Green Slime. She would go on to appear in Birch Interval (1976), the comedy/mystery film Somebody Killed Her Husband (1978), and Natural Enemies (1979). With many appearances on television, Elliott is best known having replaced actress Phyllis Newman as longtime portrayal of fictional character Renée Divine Buchanan on the ABC soap opera One Life to Live, a role she played in extended stints off-and-on during every year between 1988 and 2011. In 1973, she would star in the adaptation of The Man Without a Country. Elliott starred in The Adams Chronicles in 1976, a thirteen-episode miniseries by PBS that aired to commemorate the American Bicentennial in chapters XII–XIII as Minnie Adams. In 1978, she would star in the Made-for-TV-Movie Tartuffe. Elliott would guest star on Kojak, the ABC Afterschool Special, St. Elsewhere, and Spenser: For Hire.

Patricia Elliott won a Tony for her performance as Countess Charlotte Malcolm in the Stephen Sondheim musical A Little Night Music. She played the role of Dorine in the 1977 Tony-nominated Circle in the Square revival of Molière’s Tartuffe for which she was nominated for a Drama Desk Award. She reprised her role when the production was restaged for television on PBS in 1978. Patricia Elliot died in Manhattan on December 20, 2015, aged 77. Broadway.com reports that she died of leiomyosarcoma, a rare cancer. Beside her niece, Sally Fay, she was survived by an aunt, Claudine Walker, and several cousins.