Paul Raven

March 21 1968 Ellen tells Judge Lowell that she wishes her mother were married to Dick instead of Michael because she feels that Michael never really loved Claire and never will. Susan wonders whether she and Dan are on the same wavelength in regards to starting a family in the near future. Meanwhile, David gives Michael a vote of confidence for his future with the hospital despite the personal damage the trial and Dan's testimony did to him. Claire is disturbed over something and decides to sooth herself with a few drinks. When Michael returns home, he is shocked to realize that Claire is drunk -- and she proceeds to explain why this is so. Following her explanation about the real father of Lisa's baby, Claire throws Michael out of the house and says she never wants to see him again. After Michael leaves, Bob pays a visit to the house and finds Claire passed out on the couch and in need of medical attention. I never knew there was any relationship between Claire Cassen and Dick Martin.

Slick, in the Love of Life cast list Robert Aberdeen is listed as playing Greg Keyes from 78-80 but the Daytime TV article in the LOL thread on Gene Bua mentiond Bob Burdine as playing Greg in 1970.I assume they are the same actor and one of the references is incorrect?

I only recall McGillan in scenes with Jill over her attempts to sell the Foster home without Liz's approval. He was very minor to the story at the time and then vanished.A pity there wasn't interest in pushing Greg as he ad a lot of story potential.

Kathryn was married to Glenn for 3 years.

Charlotte Ross recalls her Days stint as Eve Ross' first TV role — right out of high school — was initiation by fire, thrown as she was into a frontburner storyline that involved a lot of eavesdropping ("They called me The Lurker") and threatening the Frankie/Jennifer romance. "It was 40 pages of dialogue a day, but it was a dream come true," she recalls of her debut as Eve, a "bitch you love to hate" kind of character. "I went to work in the dark, I came home in the dark and there was no hiatus, but it taught me a wonderful work ethic." Freaky fact: On "Days", Ross played daughter to Charles Shaughnessy, but four years later they were cast as lovers in a TV-movie. "I had to straddle him on a pool table, and I remember thinking this is the most incorrect thing!"

The Criterion Blu Ray release of The Graduate (1967) starring Dustin Hoffman and Katherine Ross includes screen tests of other contenders for those roles incuding Robert Lipton (Jeff Ward ATWT) and Jennifer Leak (Gwen Y&R/Olive AW)

Rita Lakin's memoir'The Only Girl in the Room' has been published and there is a video on her website where she briefly mentions 'The Doctors'.She says that Orin Tovrov, creator of TD held a cattle call of writers in LA and Rita accepted the job as headwriter,She thought she would oversee a team of writers and have time to enjoy NY culture and her parents were there and could spend time with her grandchildren etc.She then found out she had to churn out a script a day and wasn't getting any assistance.She didn't know at the time that the ratings were going up each week.She says it was a nightmare.She gives the impression that she only spent 5 weeks,but I think she means she only spent 5 weeks in NY before returning to LA and working from there. Hopefully she goes into more detail in the book.She did manage to get Rick Edelstein as co headwriter for her second year and did make a lot of money from that gig. I wonder if she has any interest in seeing her work on the show. Go to ritalakin.com to watch the interview.

What was the story behind Keith Charles being replaced? Was it lack of chemistry with Erika? He looks like Ivan Kipling with that moustache... Viki sporting that Julie Andrews hairdo.Interesting that the heroine of the show was hardly a glamor girl.I wonder if TBTB tried to get Erika to go with a softer look (considering it was the early 80's and all the shows were glamming up)

Meg Mundy tribute. Hope Retro keeps airing TD when Meg appears. https://classictvhistory.wordpress.com/2016/01/29/obituary-meg-mundy-1915-2016/ Meg Mundy, an actress with extensive film and theater credits who earned her greatest fame late in her career as a soap opera villainess, died on January 12 in an assisted living facility in the Bronx, according to her only son, Sotos Yannopoulos. Mundy’s death came eight days after her 101st birthday. A multi-talented beauty from a musical family, London-born Mundy was a soloist with the New York Philharmonic and a chorus girl in several Broadway shows in the late thirties. When Mundy was 19, the legendary modeling agent John Robert Powers told her that she was no beauty, “but I bet you photograph well.” Regal, almost icy – “in looks, she suggests a cross between Jeanne Eagels and Jessica Tandy (which isn’t bad looking),” wrote George Jean Nathan – Mundy had the kind of classy air that was perfect for formalwear and fashion magazines. She became one of Manhattan’s most busiest models during the forties – mainly for Vogue, although Look put Mundy and Lisa Fonssagrives, aligned in aPersona-esque pose, on its January 6, 1948 cover. Steichen, Horst, Irving Penn, and Richard Avedon all photographed her. Mundy’s second husband (out of four) was Marc Daniels, who after their divorce would move to Hollywood and direct for I Love Lucy and Star Trek. Daniels taught returning veterans at the American Theatre Wing, which created a useful workshopping opportunity for his wife – the vets needed female actors to play opposite, and Mundy was a regular volunteer. In 1942, when they met, Daniels was an actor taking voice lessons from Mundy’s mother; but his influence as he turned toward teaching and directing (“Marc taught me all I know,” she told Look, in the paternalistic parlance of 1948) helped to revive Mundy’s theatrical aspirations. After a short run in the Garson Kanin-directed How I Wonder (1947), Mundy played the title role in Sartre’s The Respectful Prostitute (1948), which started Off-Broadway and moved uptown to the Cort. Critics didn’t know what to make of the play, but Mundy got great notices: “Meg Mundy gives a performance that ranks with the best acting of the season,” wrote Brooks Atkinson. “Her Lizzie is hard but human – rasping, angry, bewildered, metallic.” Mundy’s stage career peaked with the female lead in Sidney Kingsley’s Detective Story (1949-1950); it ran for a year and a half, but Lee Grant, in a supporting role, stole the show, and the movie version replaced Mundy and her leading man, Ralph Bellamy, with Eleanor Parker and Kirk Douglas. Amidst out-of-town theater jobs and the occasional cabaret engagement (“Miss Mundy is lovely to look at, but she seems rather out of place – sort of like Queen Mary on a roller coaster,” the New York Herald-Tribune wrote of a 1950 performance at the Blue Angel), Mundy was a go-to leading lady in live television. She acted opposite Daniels in the 1948 pilot That’s Our Sherman (as in Hiram Sherman), and he directed her in segments of CBS’s Nash Airflyte Theatre and The Ford Theatre Hour, including a 1950 version of “Little Women” in which Mundy played Jo. The latter was a family affair (Daniels’s brother, Ellis Marcus, adapted the novel) as well as an unlikely A Streetcar Named Desirereunion: Kim Hunter and Karl Malden, respectively, played Meg and Friedrich Bhaer. Daniels recalled later that Beth’s canary wouldn’t sing during rehearsals but hit its cue during the broadcast, and praised Mundy’s “miraculous quick thinking in following an emergency on the air cut” for length. Mundy with Sidney Blackmer in Tales of Tomorrow (“The Dark Angel,” 1951) and Ray Walston (!) in Suspense (“Goodbye New York,” circa 1949) As with any survey of a live television star’s career, there are tantalizing highlights, too many of them lost. In January 1950, she played the Barbara Stanwyck part in Sorry, Wrong Number, telecast by CBS as a one-off color test. (“Miss Mundy’s ‘neurotic’ bed is a vivid green satin job,” reported The Washington Post.) Mundy reunited with Detective Story co-stars Lee Grant for a Playwrights ’56 and Ralph Bellamy for a 1954 U.S. Steel Hour, “Fearful Decision” (which was restaged live a year later, with the same cast). Mundy played Amelia Earhart on Omnibus, and starred in The Alcoa Hour’s 1957 “colorcast” of The Animal Kingdom with Robert Preston. Few of her early television performances were filmed – in 1954, nearing forty, Mundy had a son with her third husband, opera director Dino Yannopoulos, and was reluctant to follow television’s migration to Los Angeles – but Alfred Hitchcock brought her west for “Mr. Blanchard’s Secret,” an odd sort-of send-up of Rear Window that he tossed off for his anthology. In 1961, on the cusp of a long hiatus, Mundy played Dennis Hopper’s domineering mother in a memorable Naked City – conspiring with director Elliot Silverstein to push the Oedipal aspect to outrageous levels, Mundy’s interplay with Hopper was deliciously icky. Mundy and Dayton Lummis in Alfred Hitchcock Presents (“Mr. Blanchard’s Secret,” 1956) By the sixties, Mundy was semi-retired from acting and working as a stylist and a fashion editor for Vogue and later Mademoiselle. (For a time, she also owned a boutique in Connecticut with another daytime star, The Secret Storm’s Lori March.) Then a former agent brought her back for a showy role in a soap opera: that of Mona Aldrich (later Croft) in The Doctors, a mother-in-law from hell who schemed to break up the marriage of her son, Steve (David O’Brien), one of the show’s protagonists. Soap Opera Digest called her “the Katharine Hepburn of daytime.” Mundy played the role for almost a decade, starting around 1973, but The Doctors killed her off (with Bubonic plague) shortly before it reached its finish line in 1982. The Doctors role opened the door for some juicy movie parts – as Ryan O’Neal’s mother inOliver’s Story and Mary Tyler Moore’s mother in Ordinary People, plus Eyes of Laura Mars, The Bell Jar, and Fatal Attraction. Back on Broadway in the eighties, she was Blythe Danner’s mother in The Philadelphia Story and played word games with Jason Robards and Elizabeth Wilson in You Can’t Take It With You. Law and Order beckoned twice, but Mundy’s swan song came in daytime – as late as 2001 (when she was eighty-five), the actress was recurring as a Hungarian matron on All My Children. Mundy with Dennis Hopper in Naked City (“Shoes For Vinnie Winford,” 1961) Posted by Stephen Bowie

Reading old synopses about the introduction of Melinda Grey in August 77. TPTB obviously wanted a new young character on the show and tied her to Kim,Bob etc by making her Jennifer Hughes' long lost daughter. I wonder why they went to all the trouble of creating Melinda when Jennifer's daughter Barbara already existed? She was in the same age range and had been off the canvas for years after a short time onscreen.So her personality could have been shaped to that of Melinda. Also,that brings up some questions. If Barbara and Melinda were around the same age,what were the circumstances of Melinda's conception? Who was her father? Shortly after giving up Melinda did she marry Chuck Ryan and get pregnant with Barbara? How was it explained that Barbara never visited her mom when she was sick and died? Was this dealt with when Barbara finally arrived in Oakdale in late 78?

The Doctors on Retro is now up to October 1970. The Pollocks began as headwriters this week and Liz Hubbard returned as Althea.

Bill Bell was criticized at the time for having Jack hold the threat of paternity over Ashley at that time.Jack would never have done that to John or Ashley. Glad to see some Sandra Nelson love here. YR fan is right,Sandra's Phyllis was areal threat whereas from Day 1 I found Michelle's Phyllis to be too cartoony to be a real threat.I was waiting for Danny and Cricket to laugh at her and tell her to get lost...

Lauren's story was criticized at the time due to the fact that she didn't reveal what Shawn was up to to her husband (a private detective) whose father was a police officer.

Reading an article in TV Guide listings for January 66,I was surprised to see that the CBS affiliate in Youngstown, Ohio WKBN Ch 27 does not broadcast ATWT (or SFT and TGL)I wonder why they would not show the #1 daytime show? Could viewers pick it up on another channel? WKBN, Channel 27 (Youngstown) (CBS) Morning 07:30a CBS Morning News With Mike Wallace 07:55a News (local) 08:00a Captain Kangaroo 09:00a Romper Room 09:30a Cartoons 09:45a Classroom TV 10:00a I Love Lucy 10:30a The McCoys 11:00a Andy Griffith 11:30a Dick Van Dyke Afternoon 12:00p Love of Life 12:25p CBS News 12:30p News, Weather (local) 12:35p Movie – “Million Dollar Pursuit” 02:00p Password (guests Frank Gifford, Betty White) 02:30p House Party (guest Stan Kenton) 03:00p To Tell the Truth 03:25p CBS News 03:30p The Edge of Night 04:00p The Secret Storm 04:30p Movie – “The Mark of Zorro”

Officially Deborah left of her own accord. She stated they gave her more story and more money, but she decided to leave anyway. Unofficially there were rumours she was fired. She did come back in 86 as a temp, so it is hard to tell which is the truth. That scene you mention is pretty much the only one I have scene of Deborah acting with more malice, all the others show Jill in softer scenes, well except when she tells Phillip off, lol. The many scenes during 83-87 of them taunting each other are classic. Unfortunately it does seem Deborah's Jill had few interactions with Kay. When she came on in 1980, Jill was in the Abbott sphere and it wasn't until 1982 when Jill was about to marry John that Kay got involved in her story again. If they had any interactions prior to that it must have been brief and not story related. Kay however did have scenes with all the Jill's (at least the on contract actresses) Not sure about Melinda Fee. Kay had scenes with Jill in March 1980.That would have been Bond. Stu and Liz were married in March 1980 but Kay was not at the wedding.Maybe it was a family only affair.Pam Peters returned as Peggy for that event. Jill got the job at Jabot in May.Was that still Bond or Deborah? By now Jill and Kay were in completely different stories.Jill and Derek had no interaction, which was kind of strange after all they had been through.

Deborah Adair was great as Jill.She was abridge between the more naive Jill of Brenda (even when Brenda's Jill was seducing/tricking Stu into marriage,you got a sense of her desperation and had some sympathy for her) and Brenda's later return as uber bitch. It was interesting when Deborah returned for a week or so during one of Brenda's ' illnesses' and had to play Jill's divorce from John,She immediately brought more depth to the character. I think Bill Bell was happy with Deborah and when Brenda came back something about her take on the role had him write the character to suit her performance. As soon as Jess took over Jill began to change again.

Here's a list of Bright Promise performers as listed in Variety by year and month. Some of these dates don't correspond to your list Slick and in some instances this may be because they were recurring players and Variety mentioned them for one of their appearances(not necessarily their first).For some of the actors,Variety says '________,in for additional segments of Bright Promise' so their debut date could be earlier. 1970 Tim Brown Mar Mark Miller Mar Lesley Woods Mar Gail Kobe Apr Bartlett Robinson June Catherine McLeod June Barry Cahill Aug Forrest Compton Aug Ivor Francis Sep 1971 Tony Geary Feb Steve Dunne March Jennifer Leak March Ann Seymour April John Considine May Willard Sage May Gary Clarke May Ben Wright May Tammy Kaplan June Murray Pollock June Liza Garson July Erick Baer July Hunter Von Leer July M Jonathan Steele July Richard Eastman July Melissa Greene July Richard Cherney July Tom McAleer July Byron Morrow July Regina Gleason Aug Don Dubbins Aug Sherry Alberoni Aug Anthony Eisley Aug Ben Hammer Aug Michael Grayson Aug Fran Ryan Sept Cynthia Lynn Sep Kenneth Smedberg Sep Maxine Sams July Edward Ansara Oct Walter Brooke Nov Annette O'Toole Nov Cindy Henderson Nov Val Bisoglio Nov Cindy Henderson Nov John Hawker Dec Robert Viharo December 1972 Cheryl Miller Jan Diana Herbert Jan Peter Church add eps Feb Shirley Blackwell Feb Annette Davis Feb Brigid Brazlen Feb Ben Frank Feb

This is fantastic! Let's hope people keep sharing these rarities. Was impressed with the Walter/Lenore nuptuals.The overhead camera work,the church set and the number of extras ould put most of the current soaps to shame. Also noted in the Nov 64 that Ernest Gregory was already in the cast. I thought the Gregory's were a James Lipton creation,which in essence they were,but he took an Irna Phillips character and built a family around him.

After FRFP she did AMC and Loving.How long was she on Loving as Isabelle? I guess some of this might be online?

Thanks Danfling.Having posts from people who actually watched the shows and remember these minor characters is invaluable.As we see from The Doctors reruns,a great number of characters/actors have been forgotten.

The Marshall/Felicia story was shut down pretty quickly and Marshall recast with a lot less appealing actor. It's a pity that often shows back out of these types of stories.AW had little to lose.The ratings were already low and maybe a well written well acted interracial story might have worked,bringing the show some attention. I think Carmen Duncan was fired.As stated there were already a number of 'older' actresses on the canvas and after 6 years Duncan's salary might have put more of a strain on the shrinking budget than some 18 yr old newbie.

Variety reported in Feb 70 Another World down from a 40 share not too long ago to a 32. Bright Promise pulling a lowly 16 share against Edge of Night 39 share.

Dec 70 Love of Life 33 share Guiding Light 33 share 3.00 pm Secret Storm 25 share Another World 32 share General Hospital 32 share 3,30 Edge of Night 33 share

I agree. Liz should have been on as support to Jill and friend to Katherine and always trying to mediate between the two. I proposed at one stage that the John Silva character could have been Greg-go to lawyer and romantic option for Nina etc as played on screen.