1 hour ago, CrazySexyQ said:

Do any Loving historians know why they kept recasting Isabelle Alden? It's amusing because the character gets a new personality with each new face. She's either matronly or a snobby schemer.

Someone else will explain in better detail, but...

I'm not sure why Meg Mundy was not continued in the role after the TV-movie.

Augusta Dabney was fired to try to refocus Isabelle's role on the canvas. Celeste Holm's Isabelle was colder and scheming. She was married to Wesley Addy (Cabot) in real life. They had killed Cabot but had him return so Isabelle could talk to his ghost. This went further and further until the story was set up to reveal that Isabelle had had an affair with a man and conceived Clay, whom she passed off as Cabot's son.

Celeste Holm wasn't happy with the material, I believe, and left. Isabelle was burned with bad face cream and via plastic surgery became Pat Barry. Barry played the character very close to her character on GL almost a decade earlier - scheming, ineffectual (and vaguely Southern). She stayed in the role for about a year and a half or a little more before leaving.

Months later, Dabney returned, and the character returned to Dabney's settings (if, as some have mentioned, a little colder).

To me, Dabney was the only Isabelle and shouldn't have been recast. She's no Celeste Holm, but I don't think that type of role suited Isabelle and I would have just brought Holm in as a new character.

I would've cast Celeste Holm on AMC as the oft-mentioned, but never seen, Juanita Ramsey.

16 minutes ago, Khan said:

I would've cast Celeste Holm on AMC as the oft-mentioned, but never seen, Juanita Ramsey.

That would have been a lot of fun.

The story where Isabelle was burned with face cream was during Dabney's tenure, when Amourelle/Clay was battling Tempest/Jack & Alex. Clay stole the formula from Tempest, not realizing that it was an old rejected formula that Dane had planted for him to steal. He rushed the face cream into production and gave a jar to Isabelle, who got disfigured using it and then for some reason blamed Jack instead of Clay. This was then used to give Isabelle a motive so that she could be a red herring in the "who shot Jack?" story.

Barry took over the role when Isabelle was in the hospital after having a heart attack. Holm played the initial part of that story and was in the role when Isabelle convinced Clay and Gwyneth to remarry as her "deathbed" wish, which in turn caused about five scenes worth of conflict between Clay and Dinah Lee before Clay and Gwyneth's hasty remarriage and hastily annulled.

Dabney is the only Isabelle for me, too. If they wanted to bring on Holm, they should have brought her on as a new character, Isabelle's sister, maybe, or maybe Cabot's sister who, having lost all her money, invites herself to move back into the family home and starts driving Isabelle crazy by playing lady of the manor.

A little easter egg: while watching All My Children on Pluto TV I caught a inter-episode snippet of an interview with Agnes Nixon where she tells a story about once seeing a psychic named Mrs. Quackenbush. During her 93/94 tenure writing Loving, Nixon has Ava see a psychic named Mrs. Quackenbush to try to help her sort out the visions from her trip to heaven, and to perform a seance to try to contact Trisha only to be told that Trisha isn't on the other side.

5 minutes ago, Kane said:

The story where Isabelle was burned with face cream was during Dabney's tenure, when Amourelle/Clay was battling Tempest/Jack & Alex. Clay stole the formula from Tempest, not realizing that it was an old rejected formula that Dane had planted for him to steal. He rushed the face cream into production and gave a jar to Isabelle, who got disfigured using it and then for some reason blamed Jack instead of Clay. This was then used to give Isabelle a motive so that she could be a red herring in the "who shot Jack?" story.

Barry took over the role when Isabelle was in the hospital after having a heart attack. Holm played the initial part of that story and was in the role when Isabelle convinced Clay and Gwyneth to remarry as her "deathbed" wish, which in turn caused about five scenes worth of conflict between Clay and Dinah Lee before Clay and Gwyneth's hasty remarriage and hastily annulled

I could swear I had some memory of a clip with Barry being revealed via a face mask being taken off. I guess I at least got the hospital part right.

That Isabelle story in 1990 sounds batshit compared to most of what Dabney played...reading your blog I see that at one point she was running around with a gun, disguised herself as a nun and they thought she tried to suffocate Jack because a nun was seen with a pillow over his face or something. Were whatever writers had popped up in 1990 trying to make her Sophia from Santa Barbara?

Edited 1 hour ago1 hr by DRW50

It's strange because Isabelle doesn't really have any story from 1983-1989. Cabot is involved in plenty of stuff, but Isabelle seems to be used mostly as a talk to for various members of the Alden family and for about a year from mid-1987 to mid-1988 Dabney is taken off contract and I think only shows up for big events like weddings. Then comes 1990 and she gets a bunch of story (in addition to the face cream plot, there's also a plot where she thinks Cabot is having an affair with Ava), and then she's part of the exodus of characters written out in 1991, only to be brought back at the end of the year with a new actor in the role.