TimWil

I agree with that, watson71. I remember really scratching my head with the casting of Wesley Anne Pfenning as Alice. My ex Brian (who played Dan Shearer) said he and the rest of the cast did the same thing. There were the inevitable rumors that she may have been a "friend" of Paul Rauch's. It was Pfenning who had those first scenes at Sally's boarding school where we got our first look at SORAS'd Sally (Julie Philips). It was jarring enough at the time to see this new Alice who looked nothing at all like how we'd expect Alice to look but within a few weeks she was in scenes with a new, ahem, more mature Sally.

Vigard had serious "timekeeping issues." She was always late to set according to my friend who played her mother. This may or may not have been drug related.

GL kept her on for the taping of Morgan and Kelly's wedding but after that she was gone. When we saw Morgan on her honeymoon a week later Cooke took over the role in scenes which were shot on location.

Vigard was let go from Annie because, as the director Martin Charnin explained in a NY Times interview, she lacked the toughness and resilience which Charnin felt was needed for the title role. Andrea McArdle was playing another orphan, Pepper, in the pre-Broadway tryout at the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut and Charnin felt that she'd be a better fit for Annie than Vigard.

She was a pretty young girl who was probably fine for catalogue modeling and commercials but was extremely uninteresting as an actress. I realize that GL had to recast Morgan very quickly due to Vigard's issues being a big problem but I think they could have found someone more appropriate for the role.

I think the new family should have been Sharon's biological family. It's way overdue.

My friend Geraldine Court (Jennifer) wasn't all that enthusiastic about Jennifer Cooke. It was partly because she'd been close to Kristen Vigard (Morgan #1) and also because she felt that Cooke was a cynical casting decision-a vapid blonde with a good body and limited acting ability. She completely lacked the vulnerability of Vigard.

Ben, I think the reveal will be at Christmas, where we know who the killer is but the characters don't yet. I think the story reaches its climax (killer apprehended, killed, etc.) in February.

I agree about the Carters. It's like the Ferreiras who were absolutely an island unto themselves, ironically only interacting with a character named Shirley.

I respectfully disagree. In tonight's episode Timothy West (Stan) and Kellie Bright (Linda) were wonderful.

Maddie Hill (Nancy) had a lovely bit-"Go on, Johnny! Be free, be gay!"

The stuff with Mick and Ian at the public swimming facility really worked my last nerve, though.

Really, DRW50? I don't think the Carters are all that disastrous. I agree about Phil and Shirley, though. What a toxic pairing. Linda Henry is a good actress but that character simply isn't worthy of being pushed front and center. She should always be on the fringes.

I knew that, danfling, but he apparently returned to the role briefly in the late 90s.

I wasn't crazy about him. He was just OK. I was hoping that after he was killed it turned out he was only impersonating Steve Frame. I hated that plastic surgery angle. It's never remotely believable IMO.

I distinctly remember Victoria Wyndham saying, I think on Entertainment Tonight, that her show was undergoing a "creative renaissance" because of Jacker. I think she and the rest of the veteran cast did feel the ship was being turned around after a particularly difficult period following the 90 minute debacle. I guess it became apparent this wasn't the case. I remember finding Michele Shay (Henrietta) fascinating but she just wasn't the right kind of actress for soaps. Her line readings were often very odd.

I must have seen Robert Gentry when he returned briefly to play Ed but I just can't remember it. I was very glad to hear from my friends in the business that Gentry got pulled back from the precipice by the AIDS cocktail. When I saw him on the street in NYC in the late 80s he looked really terrible. Good for him.

Hey, I myself have been attracted to "paunchy" guys! Is "bloated" a better term? Hulswit just looked unhealthy in those last few years on the show.

No way did I find Peter Simon attractive but I did find him appealing as Ed Bauer. Richard Van Vleet looked like a store mannequin.

But they're both much-needed eye candy, BetterForgotten. And nowhere near as irritating as Callum and the Moon brothers.

Ah, well, it looks like Dean and Linda will happen. I am now awaiting DTC's call to join the writing staff!

http://m.digitalspy.com/soaps/news/a579776/eastenders-dean-wicks-flirts-with-linda-carter-spoiler-pictures.html?utm_source=twt&utm_medium=snets&utm_campaign=twitter#~oI7trStWUtGgUb

Geraldine was hoping that her role on AW would lead to a contract but she was nobody's dummy and saw that there were already enough ladies in her age range already on the show. As I wrote in my first post she loved Charles Cioffi. She enjoyed doing scenes with Beverlee McKinsey and they got along fine. She also got a kick out of doing scenes with Gretchen Oehler because they had some humor to them with June being occasionally bemused by Vivian's antics. Geraldine was one of the funniest people I've ever met. Unfortunately this was never displayed in her work on The Doctors or Guiding Light, her two biggest soap roles. I have to wonder if she hadn't played June Laverty and also if Jennifer Richards on GL didn't come through via her friend Douglas Marland if she might not have been cast as Miranda Bishop the following year. She and Judith McConnell were more or less the same age and quite similar looking physically. I think she might have been a very interesting Miranda, probably a bit frostier than McConnell, and not as, how shall I say this, as "sexually charged." In other words, she might have made a more interesting successor to Bev in a role not dissimilar to Iris.

Speaking of Miranda Bishop I forgot to mention that I have worked a lot with Diane Bradley a lot doing background acting work in films and on TV shows. Her stage name while doing AW was Bradley Bliss and she played Kit Farrell, who ended up being the Holloway heiress who'd been kidnapped by an Italian terrorist group. She's a lovely lady and still looks great. I don't ask her much about her AW days. However a few months ago I told her about this YT Channel that's got episodes from her tenure and they are of fantastic quality in terms of vision and sound. I believe DRW50 has posted a few of these, already. Anyway when I saw her when we both worked on The Good Wife in April she made a point of thanking me for pointing her toward the channel-she said her nieces and nephews finally have a really good way of seeing their aunt in action back then. That's nice. God bless YT.

Roxy made such a big deal about having a "slap up meal' and she and Aleks ended up at Beale's for burgers? That's her idea of a "slap up meal"? Talk about a cheap date.

But isn't Aleks' baby mama in Latvia?

I really think the show could bring on Phil's long-lost son from Romania. Remember when he married that Romanian woman Nadia to get her green card and it all went very wrong? He did sleep with her one more time on Christmas Day 1993 before she went away. She did return for a few episodes in 1994 but she could have been pregnant and just hadn't shown yet. Besides, the show would have no trouble retconning that final encounter, anyway.

Oops, you're right, DRW50 and robbwolff. I figured my timeline would be wrong on something! She did GL after that, then. I edited it to make the change, I guess that's my touch of OCD kicking in…heh.

i spent the better part of an hour last night reading the Virginia Dwyer vs. Harding Lemay debate. I loved it. From what I remember when watching AW back then Mary Matthews didn't strike me as an iconic mother character in the same way that Alice Horton, Nancy Hughes, Bert Bauer and even Kate Martin were. She irritated me for some reason and I thought she had zero warmth. The example that Lemay uses for his dislike of her is pretty good. He wrote in his book that she'd take a simple line like "I'm going out shopping with Pat" to (paraphrase) "I thought I'd head out and do a little shopping with Pat, maybe pick up some summer things for the twins, Pat's been depressed, she hasn't enjoyed shopping much since John left her." That was clearly a case of an actor taking what someone wrote and "improving" it with unnecessary recaps that seem to harken back to another soap age. She was, frankly, a bit of a dinosaur from another era and really didn't jibe with the radical changes that Lemay wanted to make with the show.

Carl, Carl, Carl (Hudson, I mean)--I HATED that he ended up with Rachel. I thought it was a terrible insult to Mac's memory and to all the story lines that he'd participated in. I'm pretty sure that Carl plotted to kidnap Amanda, Rachel and murder Mac during his first few years. And I think he even shot Rachel. The ONLY way I would have accepted him and Rachel as endgame would be if he'd had a Regarding Henry-type surgery where the part of his brain containing memory had to be removed following surgery for a gunshot wound and then he'd come out of it with a clean slate. I would kill to again see that Leading Ladies Of The Soaps episode of The David Susskind Show. Robin Strasser, Mary Stuart, Eileen Fulton and Victoria Wyndham were all on it, along with some others I wish I could remember. One of the few things I remember from it was Wyndham saying "Soaps are, when it comes down to it, morality tales. The evil ones eventually get their comeuppance in one way or another." Boy, was she wrong about Carl! But then again it was years later when the likes of Carl Hudson, Stefano DiMera, Adam Chandler, Palmer Cortlandt, Alan Spaulding and James Stenbeck weren't dispatched once and for all like they might have been in previous decades.

Charles Keating was a nice man, I met him a few times when a friend of mine was doing the play What The Butler Saw with him. He had actually been a hair stylist back in England before he started acting and got cast on the British miniseries Brideshead Revisited! He wasn't gay, though. In fact he had an affair with my actress friend!

Thinking back my favorite periods of AW would have to be the so-called Golden Age from 1973-1979 and then the time when Cass/Kathleen/Felicia/Wallingford/Lily/Dee were all together. I loved reading here about how the show had a "friendship' element that wasn't quite as prominent on other shows. That's so true.

I remember being very disappointed when the show chose to SORAS Amanda so rapidly from an 8 year old to an 18 year old. Sandra Ferguson was really lovely and her Amanda was the PERFECT physical combination of her mother and grandmother (same teeth and smile) and father (blonde good looks). However I would love to have seen Rachel cope with a 15 or 16 year old first, a girl who wasn't necessarily a hell raiser because that might have been too obvious.

I always remember Nancy's first day on the show. She was picked up by the Cory driver from school and "Girls just Wanna Have Fun" blasted from the limo's radio. And Nancy bopped around that limo to it (I even think she was wearing a yellow, Cyndi Lauper-ish dress) and we got an immediate sense of what we were in for with her. Too bad that potential was gone within months.

Speaking of music I remember at around that same time a sequence when Marley (Ellen Wheeler) dreamed of someday meeting the right boy. She was sitting at a fountain and a boy appeared in silhouette (it wasn't Richard Steen, who played Ben) and on the soundtrack was Lionel Richie's "Hello." Ben showed up no more than a few weeks later. And then seemingly within months he disappeared. I'm with the club that never understood why he didn't become a central character on AW until the end. Wheeler was so brilliant as Victoria pretending to be Marley, she would make her voice go way up high like Marley's, only she'd make her voice go up even HIGHER, as if to mock Marley. I loved Anne Heche but Wheeler was my all-time favorite. Don't get me started on Jensen Buchanan-she was a prime example of cynical soap casting. She was fine as a relatively minor character on One life To Live but she was definitely not worthy of helping to carry a show. And I HATED how she'd pronounce Carl's name-she always pronounce it like "Carol"!

Thanks, Paul. I was trying to remember if I'd actually done any background acting on AW during its run but I'm pretty sure I'd remember that. A friend of mine worked it a lot, though. He really loved it down there at that studio way the hell out in Brooklyn. He especially loved working the gala scenes because they'd take a long time and the paycheck was good. The Lumina Ball episodes took an extremely long time to do. He said the actors were so much fun to be around and everybody was treated the same. On one of the days (actually it was night), they had been taping for 16 hours and everybody was literally lying on the floor, exhausted. One of the cute young background actors asked one of the principal actresses if she needed anything. And she said "Yes, honey, I'd like you to shoot a big hot load down my throat." Sorry, I'd better not name who it was but it definitely wasn't Victoria Wyndham or Anna Stuart (although Anna could be very flirty and bawdy herself)!

Well, delving into this AW thread for the past week has been as wonderful an experience as delving into the others here (EastEnders/GL/ATWT) on SON. And, as with the others, I've had a few personal brushes with this show that I'd love to share:

I guess I should preface this with my first brush with this show as a viewer. My earliest memory is being at a friend's house when I was 12 and suddenly hearing his mom yell "THAT BITCH!" It turned out she was referring to this Rachel person on TV who'd taken it upon herself to send "dead baby clothes" to someone who'd just suffered a miscarriage. I remember seeing this Rachel person on-screen for a few scenes and she scared me to death. The woman looked liked a witch.

I had become a professional child actor a year earlier. And a few months after that cursory introduction to AW at my friend's house I found myself auditioning for a role on it. I can barely remember most of my early auditions but this one is still quite vivid in my mind. The audition was at an ad agency (BBD&O, I think) and the casting director's name was Dorothy Purser. I walked into a small office and Miss Purser introduced me to the person who I'd be reading with, Constance Ford. I was startled when I first saw her because I immediately recognized her as the vicious mother in A Summer Place, which I'd seen on The Million Dollar Movie on TV more than once. But this woman in front of me was very different. She was wearing jeans and what looked like a man's button down shirt. She looked me dead in the eye, shook my hand very firmly, smiled broadly and said softly "Hi. How you doin'?" Wow. I will always remember that. She was regarding me as a fellow professional and not some little kid, for starters, something I wasn't really used to at that point. I have no recollection of the audition apart from that. I didn't get the job because it was apparently for Dennis Carrington and the kid who was playing the role (Mike Hammett) had agents who were asking for too much money to renew his contract. His agents backed down once they knew auditions were being held to replace him. Oh, well. A year later I was supposedly being considered to replace Bobby Doran as Jamie but that didn't happen, either. I like to think Constance Ford might have remembered and suggested me. I'll never know. I was just so damned impressed that she showed up to read with a bunch of kids for the role of someone who wasn't even in her storyline. Maybe the fact that she did show up for this intimidated Hammett's agents.

In the fall of 1973 I was doing a tour of The Sound Of Music and tutoring only took a few hours a day. I became hooked on AW and watched it every day and for the next six years I'd watch it during other out of town theater jobs, vacations and in the summer. I clearly remember Mary Matthews' death and Jamie and Dennis finding their chauffeur pal Rocky's dismembered body in garbage bags stuffed under the floorboards of a boat house. I guess I had a peculiar kind of good taste at a young age because I adored that show. I loved the architects Carol Lamont, Neil Johnson and Gwen Parrish at Frame Construction and the scenes at Cory Publishing at The Complex. And, of course, Mac, Rachel and Iris. The show had a sophistication which seemed sorely lacking in the other shows I tried watching. I did get sucked into some of the others but I knew AW was particularly special. And it was. I was in a production of Macbeth in 1974 and John Getz (Neil Johnson) was my fellow understudy in it. He never got to go on for Christopher Walken but I got to go on for one of the guys I was understudying. See the Guiding Light thread for my full story! John was a nice guy. i think I knew not to bring up AW too much because he was focusing on the play.

In 1977 I was directed in a play by Brian Murray. We stayed in touch and he called me up the following spring because he was about to start on AW as Dr. Dan Shearer at the same time a play he was in, Da, was transferring to Broadway from an Off-Broadway theater (it was directed by Melvin Bernhardt, one of AW's directors). I filled him in on the characters and assured him it was THE soap he should ever be on. He'd call from time to time and tell me how it was going. He was very happy with the company of actors he was with-he was close friends with Susan Harney (Alice), Lynn Milgrim (Susan, he became her daughter's godfather)) and fellow Broadway theater actors Douglass Watson, John Tillinger and Joseph Maher. He also became very good friends with Harding Lemay. He realized his role was never going to be all that substantial compared to, say, Watson's, but that was fine with him. The show going to 90 minutes became a big problem for him, though, especially since he was still performing the lead in the play on Broadway 8 times a week. He had Paul Stevens (Brian Bancroft) hire me for a few months to run lines with him-Paul was a very elegant, very nice man. When Brian left AW (Dr. Dan and his wife Susan eventually reconciled and left Bay City) he knew he'd been on a soap that was winding up a Golden Age of sorts. AW really did have an extraordinary assortment of theater actors during that time. He did a few weeks on GL a year or so later but that was only as a favor to a producer. I alerted him to the fact that Dan and Susan's adopted daughter Julia had started appearing on the show. He watched it a bit to see Kyra Sedgwick-he sort of wished he could go back on it to have a few scenes with her.

In 1979 my friend Geraldine Court got a role on it as June Laverty. I think she was only in it for 6 months. I remember her saying she loved Charles Cioffi who played her husband Kirk. She was not fond of Dan Hamilton, the actor who played Jeff Stone, her character's lover. She told me he enjoyed their kissing scenes TOO much and he was married and had a young son. She admired Beverlee McKinsey a lot, especially in her chutzpah in marching up to the production office to find out advance storyline information. The other actors would subsequently pump her for info for themselves. And she claimed McKinsey had installed little lights in various drawers on the set so when she opened them up she would be lit from below which was SO much more flattering than overhead lighting!

In 1984 i did a really wonderful set of one-act plays called Laughing Stock, written by Romulus linney (Laura Linney's father). Leon Russom (Willis) was in the cast. He was a great guy and every so often he'd tell me stories about his days on AW. He was very happy there but frustrated with his character who he termed a "loser." He loved working with Dorothy Lyman (Gwen). at one point Willis was supposed to be paired up with Rachel but Victoria Wyndham put her foot down about it and it didn't happen. He wasn't personally offended, he said she did it because she didn't want Rachel to be screwing another Frame. He said the only love interest she stopped Rachel from continuing with was Frank, a Vietnam vet who took interest in her sculpting. The actor who played him was an absolute train wreck when it came to remembering lines. And his breath was bad.

In 1987 I worked at two different agents' offices. At the first one I met Anne Howard, who flew in from LA to screen test for Nicole Love. I wasn't surprised she landed the gig. We went out to lunch and I filled her in on what I knew about the show. Anne was really sweet. The only dish I got out of her was that things were distinctly frosty between "Sandy" Ferguson and Robert Kelker-Kelly because he'd "strung her along" and was having an affair with a production assistant. When I worked for the other agent I met Anne Heche who visited the office with her then-boyfriend Richard Burgi, who was also on the show. He didn't speak much and she spoke a blue streak. She was a lot of fun. Her face lit up when I told her I was acquainted with Anna Stuart aka Anna Banana. She adored her. When I worked for these agents I would come across "casting breakdowns" for all the soaps. The one from AW that stands out was one for "Pamela Davis- early 30s, dark hair preferred, beautiful, intelligent, strong-minded, witty woman who is not above using her innate sexuality to get what she wants." They never did introduce Rachel's half-sister, did they? I'm pretty sure a new production regime cut short those plans-that sort of thing wasn't unusual.

In 1988 Brian told me he'd spoken to Harding Lemay about me. I was hoping maybe I could work for him as an assistant down the road. Lemay was quite friendly and talkative. I got to talk with him a lot about his previous stint on AW. He was fascinating. He told me his plans for the show. He had written a huge umbrella storyline which would begin with Jason Frame running a black market baby racket through the Frame farm. He made a point of saying it was actually a social issue storyline, not a melodramatic one, nobody would end up dead or blind by the conclusion of it. He mentioned Anna Holbrook, who played Sharlene, he saw a lot of potential in her. He was upfront with me and told me that his son would be working with him and that there would likely be no place for me. I appreciated his honesty. Of course a few months later he was off the show-maybe P&G nixed the black market baby storyline that he was so enthusiastic about?

OK, that's all I can muster for now. I look forward to sharing my opinions on AW history with you all!

Ben, your correction was perfectly respectful. I admit I was tempted to do the honors, myself, but I'm new here and reluctant to seem a smartypants!

The early 90s were a fantastic rebound from that awful time when Pauline was ill, Northerner Julie ran the salon and Trevor was the "lovable loser" you wanted to smack.

Wow, really, Cassadine1991? Very sad loss.

Wow, Hulswit really was handsome. By the time I started watching in the spring of 1980 he was paunchy and unattractive.

Oh, dear, WLIW/Ch 21 here in NY has gotten around to the awful Demi/Leo story. I didn't understand the nastiness levelled toward Shana Swash on the UK message boards at the time-I thought she was rather sweet. The poor kid who played Leo must have been overwhelmed by all the material he had been given for those couple of episodes.

The Millers were an even worse family than the DiMarcos IMO. Both parents were awful. The actor who played Keith was repulsive looking and played him as a complete buffoon. The actress who played Rosie was absolutely dreary and couid only ever lurch between appearing shrew-ish and pathetic. I thought she was one of the biggest casting mistakes the show has ever made. Is it true she actually bitched about the show when she was finally let go? I thought Kara Tointon (who joined the show a bit later on, I think) was pretty but her voice/accent irritated me a lot. I ended up seeing her in panto in Bristol as Snow White some months after she'd been let go and she was a very pleasant surprise. Her then-boyfriend Joe Swash (who'd played Mickey) was in the cast, too, and he was downright amateurish. Apparently he had just done a stint in I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here and he forgot to learn his lines Down Under.

In the episodes shown tonight we got our first look at Cheryl Fergison who first played a character named Meg, who Big Mo was visiting in prison. Interesting.

And this episode is a good example of Elizabeth Hubbard's "messy" acting style. It drove me nuts at times watching her. I worked often as a stand-in on Law & Order and she was there as a day player once. Her acting in the scene in Stone's office (or was it McCoy's by then) was subtle and controlled and I wanted to take her aside and ask her why couldn't she play Lucinda more like that!