Xanthe

Sad to hear that she had been ill. Jennifer Marlowe was such a fantastic character and she did it perfectly.

Vicky was recast, briefly, but the recast also left before the end of the year. I have never seen another recast like it -- on the Friday we saw only a mystery person's leg as she went with Reginald to Marley and Jake's wedding. Marley threw her bouquet at the end of Friday and she and Jake immediately left. On Monday the face of the recast Victoria was revealed as she caught the bouquet. Ellen Wheeler had stopped playing Victoria in July but they didn't want to show the recast of a non-identical actress in the same episode as Ellen's Marley. The recast Vince showed up quite early in 1987 but it was late February before Philece Sampler took over the role of Donna. I'm glad Anna Stuart didn't have to put up with the storyline that Philece played out (mainly the Lust for John) even though I imagine she would have somehow improved the execution of it even though it was so intolerable.

And then of course Quinn was killed off and I think it was Marcus Smythe, the third (and ultimately final) Peter Love, who was the actor with the next longest tenure in the list. It felt remarkable at the time. Was it just as bad in 1982 when Beverly Penberthy left as Pat?

AW had so many cycles where there was an obvious big reset and suddenly everyone was a stranger. I don't know if there was one particular flashpoint where the housecleaning was so thorough that they got themselves into a pattern where too many contracts just always expired at the same time and so we just saw huge turnover every couple of years after that. Obviously that wasn't the case with the two biggest most disappointing losses of 1991, Cali Timmins and Dack Rambo, who didn't complete their contracts. But I remember by mid-1987 there had been so many characters written out that only Douglass Watson, Victoria Wyndham, Constance Ford, Linda Dano, and Brent Collins had been around for more than 18 months. Spotted Alice Barrett in this Acutrim ad.

I can't feel as strongly about Jensen as that. I thought she was perfectly capable of delivering lines and conveying emotion. I reserve "can't act" for performers who seem to have to concentrate so hard on getting the words out that they don't have any energy left for varying their emotions. I did not care for the recast Dennis at all. I thought that the progress of Felicia's story, adopting Jenna and having Lucas come back into her life with the reveal about her baby building up to finding Lorna was good. I wasn't crazy about Dean at the time but when I catch scenes with him and Jenna now I find myself liking them.

One of the Dionne quintuplets has died at age 91. Only Annette survives. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/cécile-dionne-obituary-dionne-quituplets-1.7599411 I did not lead with her name, Cécile, because reading Cécile Dionne too quickly has confused many people.

ATWT had moved into the Brooklyn studio, hadn't they?

Unfair only in the sense that the writing about the character Amanda at the time she was created was really about Rachel and Mac and Iris. And in that sense was it any more meaningful than saying that Donna Swajeski created the Red Swan? It's not a major issue or anything, just idle musing about the significance of creating a character as opposed to writing for a character.

It feels very unfair to credit Lemay with the creation of the character Amanda just because he wrote the story in which the baby was born. I suppose one could argue that he created her place in the family and anything that happened later had a dependency on that, but there was no real character in the sense of personality for a number of years. Of course I suppose that in that sense it is also impossible to give the writer *full* credit for characterization -- so much depends on the contributions from the actor and director.

Did he also change Liz?

According to the invitation he is Mark Penberthy. https://boards.soapoperanetwork.com/topic/30343-another-world-discussion-thread/page/684/#findComment-1890356

IIRC, Rauch told him that Courtney had not gone all out in rehearsal, cunningly concealing how she intended to play the scene until the taping by which time it was too late for the powerless director to correct her. How could anyone possibly blame the poor director or producer under those circumstances? Jacqueline Courtney was simply too clever for them. ETA: It took Lemay to bring her to heel! From the book --

Just saw the news that Tom Lehrer has died. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/jul/28/tom-lehrer-dies-aged-97-dead-musical-satirist I only recently learned that he had done songs for the Electric Company. Don't know why I hadn't known that.

I would agree that making the ingénue boring is weak writing, but I will point out that by this point Rachel had let her bad girl card lapse a bit. She was a heroine for having saved Mac from Janice and even the shocking fact of Matthew's conception was part of her sacrifice in that storyline. On the whole of course Steve's return from the dead didn't have many long-term implications -- after he died again Rachel remarried Mac and former bad-girl Blaine married Sandy and former bad girl Sally started on a more virtuous path despite her secret love child. Steve's Australian stepdaughter left town and Alice was gone. Maybe the introduction of Quinn was the best, longest impact of Steve's return, and it wasn't long enough.

I think this may be the wrong year. Mr Brandeis was a prospective buyer for Carl's horse Stowaway (which for some reason he had put in Sandy's name so the deal fell apart) in 1985, not 1986.

I do wonder whether the original plan was always to put Rachel and Canary-Steve together or whether they changed the storyline based on audience response or behind-the-scenes factors. Vana Tribbey's Alice grew close to Mac while he was separated from Rachel in the aftermath of Janice/Mitch/St Croix. Tribbey was on only 6 months, which seems like she was fired and replaced quickly at short notice with Linda Borgeson. And Borgeson stayed for only a year. Alice during this time period made very little impression on me so I would not have a strong sense of the character and who was better. But it seemed inappropriate to construe Rachel as Steve's True Love and also unhelpful story-wise to squeeze Alice out.

Quite possibly, but I wonder if they will have to do quite so much archaeology and reconstruction to fill in gaps! If the modern shows are more easily preserved and archived it will be much easier to check the primary sources. (But if they are copy-protected so that viewers can't preserve their own copies maybe they won't be accessible enough anyway.)

Thanks! I remember loving the drama of Catlin lying to Sally that he had never loved her, and Ada telling him not to be such a dolt, and then everyone believing he was dead for a couple of weeks or so. I had not remembered that Cecile also went to the hypnotist and "proved" that she loved Peter and Cass equally and could not possibly choose between them. Ben must have met Marley at the party right after this since when they first met she believed he was rich (not that it mattered to her, but Donna would not have accepted him if she had realized he was not from the upper crust). Nancy was shallow and mostly interested in Perry for his money. Nice to see Quinn and Thomasina together. And Donna on good terms with Carl for a change, but mostly thinking about Peter. It was really key to Donna's character in those days that she thought she was doing what was best for her family even as she spoiled their happiness. On the subject of Laura Malone, I saw this interesting tidbit in the comments -- a variation on the baby weight story that suggests the way it played out actually suited her.

Thanks @vetsoapfan and @Tisy-Lish for your recollections. I read some of the 1972 synopses on the AWHP and was surprised to learn that the snakebite story coincided with Robin Strasser's departure -- immediately afterward Rachel took Jamie out of town and when Steve tracked her down she was Victoria Wyndham.

Thanks for the detailed background. The little summary I read on the AWHP gave me the impression that Rachel was head over heels in love with Ted and then suddenly started sneaking around with Steve which drove good-for-nothing Ted away. Were the child actor and the snake in the same shot? I feel like I have seen so many examples of carefully cut scenes where you don't see the actor at the same time as the threat that that's what I would have imagined.

Thanks for this. I gather that is interim husband Ted Clark who I don't think was mentioned in later years even though his sister also married Russ. Based on what I see on the AWHP, it would have been Robin Strasser's Rachel that married Ted and Victoria Wyndham's who divorced him. What were Alice and Steve doing while Rachel was with Ted?

Born in 1949. And the character he was playing wasn't a child, Chris Chapin was a doctor. The only reason he was considered young was because he had to be suitable to date Nancy who had only recently finished high school. For context, Victoria Wyndham was born in 1945. Scardino was 10 years older than Vincent Irizarry and Michael E Knight who were in the same category that year. Jon Hensley was younger, born in 1965, and Brian Bloom the youngest, born in 1970. I don't want to give actors too much grief for playing characters outside their real age, but the nomination in the category doesn't seem to be in the spirit of the thing. I gather the Daytime Emmys changed the rules later so that a "younger" performer had to be no more than 25.

I don't know about pull -- Lemay had quite a few complaints about the sponsor and the network preventing him from telling stories the way he wanted to tell them. Corporate fear of the audience is going to carry a lot of weight. If Swajeski didn't want to go as far as having Jake rape Marley (in order to give her a motive to shoot him and in order to give Victoria a big dramatic reaction scene), what would she have done instead? It's hard to think of any lesser betrayal that would give the same dramatic result. I would find it easier to believe that Swajeski opposed the story If she had presented the alternative that she would have written instead. Otherwise it sounds more like she regrets being given grief for redeeming Jake later without having him properly deal with what he had done.

Oh, I always think of it as Marley being crushed to feed Vicky. Jake cheated on Marley so that he could be in Bay City alone as an antagonist for Vicky. Marley drifted through Bay City so that Vicky would have an opportunity to impersonate her. Marley had fertility issues to raise the stakes of the custody of Steven. Jake raped Marley so that Vicky could utterly lose it when she found out about it. I don't know whether I would exactly say that Jake was ruined in the same way. It's true that he was originally essentially a good guy in order to be worthy of Marley. It was only when he came back in 1988 that he started to become actively bad -- but on the plus side at that time I felt the audience had permission to see him as bad. But they started to try to make him a good guy with Paulina and then ultimately made him Vicky's final true love without regard for Marley. I agree that Grant as played by Mark Pinter was less sympathetic than Dack Rambo. If I weren't at work I would be trying to compile a survey of AW's villains and their levels of depth and humanity. Was Carl actually the longest-running villain the show had? He and Reginald were I think the most international supervillains the show had, sometimes to a ludicrous degree. Carl was given more opportunity to have human emotions than Reginald IMO. I don't remember Olive very well but reading the synopses she comes across as completely wicked with no redeeming features. Rachel and Iris seemed more rounded but again maybe that was also because they had more time to develop.

Watching the earlier promo however, the voiceover asks if Marley will give in to passion, but the visual looks as if she is petrified rather than wishing that she could be intimate with her husband even though he had cheated on her. It absolutely looks like Jake would rape Marley. And so would nasty pissy Jake who treated mentally ill Marley so harshly in 1999. And I understand that at that point he was reacting to the fact that she had recently taken Vicky hostage and he had been afraid for Vicky's life but that didn't make him seem less capable of being abusive or threatening. You have obviously watched these more recently than I have, but I thought that Jake was pretty clearly a villain from his return in 1988 until after he and Paulina fell in true love in late 1991 or early 1992. He had cheated on Marley, tried to take custody of Steven from Vicky, blackmailed Paulina, and did whatever else he did to make it plausible that most of the women on the show would have been justified in shooting him.