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 18 hours ago18 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.

Thanks @DRW50 @Khan @Kane for the Isabelle explainer.

I've been binging the early 90s of Loving (out of order), and the character's backstory fills in some gaps. Some of these plots seem right out of Passions, but it is a soap opera. Before this, all I really knew about the Isabelle actresses was surface-level and that Michael Weatherly said on a podcast that Celeste Holm kept her Oscar in her dressing room. Frankly, I'd do the same if I ever won one.

My favorite version is Dabney's Isabelle, but Pat Barry cracks me up because she's so extra. And I remember her being on Ghostwriter as Lana Barnes.

Dabney's Isabelle was Alice Horton with money, Holm was like Stephanie Forrester and Barry was Loving's version of Phoebe Tyler.

Mundy would have been great though, too bad she left after the pilot.

The show's casting was great at first. I loved Shannon Eubanks as regal Ann.

The only parts that needed actors with a different energy were Roger and Merril.

In the bible, I believe Isabelle is described as a Eleanor Roosevelt type, very diplomatic and pragmatic. Meg Mundy, who was well known for her controlling society matron role on The Doctors, was initially cast against type to play Isabelle. Mundy, though, had recently played a more gentle grandmother role in the film Ordinary People. I think Mundy would have been bored with role eventually, though I wonder if Doug Marland, who had written for Mundy in her previous role, would have given Isabelle more of an edge, especially in light of the arrival of Shana. Ultimately, it wasn't creative issues that led to Mundy's decision to not continue with the daily series after the telefilm, it was money. She wanted more than ABC was willing to pay.

Augusta Dabney really embodied that initial description of the character. She seems very sweet, but I haven't really seen any of her work that seems super memorable. That isn't something I would fault Dabney. There are some scenes when she and Cabot return in 1994 where Clay confronts Dabney's Isabelle about his paternity and it just seems quite unfair to see Dabney's Isabelle suffer for the sins of the previous Isabelles. Dabney does her best trying to bridge the characters, but it would a hard sell for anyone.

The evolution of Isabelle in the 1990s was the result of constant changeover. The face cream story was Tom King /Millee Taggert with Jacquie Babbin as EP. Babbin wanted to shake up the show. In interviews, I believe Babbin alluded that the Aldens represented too much of the Reagan / Dynasty era and that she wanted something different. It is Babbin who's behind Isabelle's departure in March, 1991, after Cabot's death. When Celeste Holms' Isabelle returns in late November, 1991, it is now Fran Sears (of Handmaid's Tale fame) who is EP with Mary Ryan Munisteri headwriting.

Munisteri's version of Isabelle, played by Celeste Holms, is a delightful character who is a little bit wicked and is paired with Matt Ford's mother, Bethel Ford as her social secretary. Holm's Isabelle shows a unique approach to business that works in the brief weeks that Munisteri pens the character. She utilizes her social connections to determine where businessmen are located. One of my favorite Isabelle scenes is when she is interviewing Bethel and Bethel is instructed to call Shana so that Shana will badmouth Isabelle while Isabelle listens in.

The shift to Addie Walsh is very harsh. Celeste Holms was promised the chance to work with her husband Wesley Addy, and those scenes are very whimsical at first before they end with an abrupt about face from Cabot's ghost telling Isabelle "she knows what she has done." Walsh recycled her work from the French soap Riviera penning a story that undid the paternity of one of the central characters under similar circumstances, I believe. This version of Isabelle became increasingly menacing and controlling. Holmes didn't like the character and I believe clashed with new EP Haidee Granger when she arrived. Granger doesn't seem well liked from one of the Loving interviews several years back.

Pat Barry's Isabelle is a snob. As @Sapounopera pointed out, she becomes a carbon copy Phoebe Wallingford complete with a visit from Ruth Warrick's Phoebe as Isabelle's friend.

I know its sacrilegious, but I enjoy Celeste Holmes the most.

46 minutes ago, DRW50 said:

Much appreciated, @DRW50! The Gwyneth-focused promo at 25:40 is to die for!

You can always count on @dc11786 to do the most thorough and well-researched analysis around on a soap, especially for Loving. Thanks again.