Another World

[cassadine1991]

It's been confirmed

http://www.serialscoop.com/2014/08/charles-keating-dead-at-72.html?m=1

[amybrickwallace]

Yup, it's up on We Loves Soaps. too. I imagine Vicky Wyndham is especially devastated right now - I know they were the best of friends off camera.

[jam6242]

I was holding out hope that it was a mix-up. Very sad news.

[NothinButAttitude]

RIP, Charles.

One of my favorite soap actors (alongside the late Zaslow). Carl and Rachel were my original favorite couples on AW. I am so upset over this.

[amybrickwallace]

His look (the long silver ponytail) and his Shakespearean style were so unique for daytime. I don't think we'll ever see anyone quite like him on a soap again, sad to say.

Edited August 9, 2014 by amybrickwallace

[TimWil]

A friend of mine did the play What The Butler Saw with him on Broadway. She said he was a hairdresser in his youth back in England! She said he was very naughty but adorable.

[amybrickwallace]

According to The Ultimate Another World Trivia Book by Gerry Waggett, Charles Keating was indeed a hairdresser. In that same book, here is a funny anecdote about Mr. Keating:

"The combination of playing Edmund the Bastard in King Lear and giving up smoking made Charles Keating (Carl Hutchins) more than a little irritable. Upon finding a pair of sneakers in the kitchen, he threw them into the backyard and admonished his two sons to learn how to put their things away. One of his sons pointed out that the sneakers were Keating's own and then offered to buy him a pack of cigarettes."

LOL!!!!

[teplin]

I saw this news reported elsewhere early yesterday and was hoping it was a mix-up. Sad to read this morning that it's been confirmed. I loved Keating's portrayal of Carl, both pre- and post-redemption. His performance was hammy in the very best way -- just this side of over the top but always absolutely committed and totally riveting. There's another current thread about actors who "phone it in" ... Charles Keating never did. I found Carl and Rachel's romance hard to swallow from a logical perspective, but I couldn't deny the chemistry, skill and dedication of the actors. I still find it hard to believe that so much airtime was spent on a courtship between two characters in their 50s while TV networks were becoming ever more obsessed with the elusive youth demo. I understand NBC strongly resisted it, but there was no denying the fan appeal of Carl and Rachel -- or the talent of Charles Keating.

[Paul Raven]

At the NBC affiliate meetings in June 87,Brian Frons said they had signed Sally Sussman to develop a serial that could play as 30 mins or 1 hour and could be ready by end of 88 and that this should send a message to P&G that they need to invest and improve AW or it will go the way of SFT

He stated that AW poor performance was bringing down Santa Barbara and the network had taken a hard look at AW and had refocused the story by getting back to basics and focusing on new talent. They planned to drastically improve the show or replace it with an NBC produced show.

[BetterForgotten]

I still don't understand how AW could be blamed for SB not being a ratings success, but oh well. Plans must have changed when Generations was a failure in itself.

Poor AW, it was the bastard child for both P&G and NBC it seems, at least from the 80's onward.

Edited August 10, 2014 by BetterForgotten

[NothinButAttitude]

I guess Brian Frons was a clueless idiot back in the 80s as well. How was it AW's fault that SB wasn't flourishing? Did he not factor in (like most intelligent people would) that SB was running against GL & GH, two extremely popular and established soaps, in the 3:00 market?

And I too hated how AW was the 'bastard child' of NBC. Even when I started to watch in the 90s as a child, you could see it. I find that odd though seeing as when AW was canceled, most soap fans were upset. AW also tends to be the one soap (too) that most fans mention as being the show that they started on as a child.

But hell, this was normal for all P&G shows. They tended to be expendable when they all set the tone for genre.

The mistreatment of AW leading to it's cancellation IMO sparked the downfall of the genre as a whole.

[Khan]

I definitely believe that was when the worm turned, as it were. AW's cancellation proved no soap was safe anymore. I remember, too, AW fans pretty much warning GL fans that they were next -- and boy were they right.

[Max]

To be fair, I think that SB would have performed considerably better than it did had it aired in the post-DOOL time-slot, as (1) DOOL would have been a much more popular lead-in and (2) SB had more in common with DOOL than AW had in common with DOOL. And keep in mind that AW is my all-time favorite soap, so I am trying to see this is in a purely objective manner.

Edited August 11, 2014 by Max

[NothinButAttitude]

Sadly, I was a fan of both so I was a true wreck. I still miss my P&G shows (AW/ATWT/GL) to this day.

Not uh! Had they did that, AW might've been canceled sooner than what it was. I've loved of what I've seen of SB online, but AW was my heart! Now if they switched AW and DAYS timeslots then maybe I'd've been for it.

[Paul Raven]

At the time of AW's cancellation.

"When you are 25, you don't relate to a 50-year-old's love story," said Susan Lee, a vice president of daytime programming. "There's a lot of stuff that went down in our research that I wouldn't tell the people on 'Another World' because it would be too painful for them."