Another World

[amybrickwallace]

It really seems like he projected his contempt for certain actors onto their characters. 

[Nicholas Blair]

My feelings about Mary Matthews are no doubt colored by the fact that Virginia Dwyer somewhat resembled my mother. Mary was in many ways a typical middle-class woman of her era. She did not work outside of the home, but she was a strong presence in her family and her community, a devoted wife and mother of three fine, upstanding children. OK, Pat got pregnant, had an abortion, and shot her boyfriend, but these things will happen! Mary was perhaps a touch less outgoing than Nancy Hughes or Alice Horton and kept her emotions a little more in check, as many women and almost all the men of her generation and class were brought up to do.

Lemay did not grown up in this kind of middle-class family, instead growing up poor and fantasizing about what it would be like to be rich. He did not understand or appreciate people like the Matthews family or the communities which produced them. In many ways, AW was a poor fit for him, because the Matthews family had always been central to it.

I did not know that he would give Mary's scenes to Ada or Liz, both played by actresses he liked. Lemay recounts how Virginia Dwyer asked for a meeting with him at the Russian Tea Room. Obviously she knew there was a problem and wanted to improve matters. He brags about grabbing the seat at the banquette facing the room, where Virginia could have seen friends who happen to come in. He was miffed when she introduced him to some friends as the new writer on her show, when he had been there two years. In any event, the meeting did not improve things, and it's clear that Lemay simply wanted to get rid of her.

According to Lemay, Virginia Dwyer had trouble with her lines so that Hugh Marlowe wasn't getting his cues, and that after the firing, Hugh Marlowe sent him a telegram saying, "God bless you, Pete." Was she beginning to have memory problems? Did her unhappiness with the way he was writing her character lead to less capable work by her?

I remember what a shock it was to the audience when Mary was killed off. Many people assumed Virginia Dwyer had died, decided to retire, or was in poor health. The magazines wrote about this topic extensively at the time, wondering if killing off older characters was a trend in the soaps.

[Bill Bauer]

Wasn't Hugh Marlow the one who was always flubbing up his lines? He probably blamed it on Dwyer. Sorry, but Hugh Marlow had no room to criticize someone else's acting skills. 

[Efulton]

i thought the situation was that Virginia Dwyer would change her lines to better reflect who she felt Mary was and not how Lemay was writing her.  Hugh Marlowe was struggling to remember his lines at the best of times and was thrown off because his cues were no longer as they were in the script.  Once again Lemay's ego and favouritism was on full display.  He praised Connie Ford (who was a stage actress he loved) for changing her lines but was angered when Virginia Dwyer (a soap actress he did not like) did the same.  

[amybrickwallace]

Lemay was a talented writer to be sure, but his ego and gigantic sense of self-importance were on full display in that memoir. Not only to the aforementioned actors, but to the fans who wrote in.

[Mona Kane Croft]

Hugh Marlowe was by far my favorite Jim Matthews.  But Marlowe was a film actor who was obviously unprepared for the rigor of daytime television.  He stammered and flubbed through his lines to the point of embarrassment at times.  And his acting did not improve after Dwyer was fired.  His blaming Virginia Dwyer for his problems remember lines was ridiculous.   Still Marlowe had a great fatherly/grandfatherly presence on Another World, and I did enjoy him as Jim.   

Marlowe was sort of the "Jonathan Frid" of Another World.  A very good actor who simply had a problem remembering his lines.     And it was no ones fault other than his own.   

Edited October 13, 2021 by Neil Johnson

[amybrickwallace]

That's what I noticed about him in the episodes circa 1980 that I saw on YouTube.

[TVFAN1144]

Thanks for the background on this character.  
 
I actually prefer her style over other matriarchs. I loved Nancy Hughes on ATWT but she was very domineering and interfered a lot. And I’ve seen clips of Bert Bauer on earlier GL clips where the character was difficult 

[amybrickwallace]

Yes, she was the queen of the guilt trip.

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[vetsoapfan]

You said that perfectly. I agree with every word. Mary Matthews was created to be, and was, an important and strong matriarch from 1964 until 1971 when Lemay took over. He claimed that people like Mary didn't really exist, and tried to change her into a shrewish harpy. It didn't work, and Lemay became increasingly annoyed at Virginia Dwyer for trying to keep an honest and consistent through-line for her character. Killing off Mary was an egregious error that seriously damaged the show. How deciding to axe Dwyer, George Reinholt, and Jacqueline Courtney all within a few months of each other didn't make someone, anyone, at P&G and NBC stand up to Lemay and Rauch and bellow, "Hell to the NO!" is baffling. Susan Sullivan quit at the end of the same year, we lost Alice, Steve, Mary and Lenore in 1975. IMHO, AW never recovered after that.

[vetsoapfan]

Exactly. Lemay complained that Dwyer changed and edited her lines to better reflect the nature of her character, which allegedly threw Hugh Marlowe off. Ironically (or should I say, hypocritically?), while Lemay lambasted Dwyer for changing her dialogue, he reaped praise on his pets like Constance Ford and Victoria Wyndham for DOING THE EXACT SAME THING. And Hugh Marlowe was clearly having issues by then. He had begun to stumble over his lines no matter WHOM he had as a scene partner, and his flubs continues long after Dwyer left the series

Oops, I did not see your well-written post before I made similar comments. Anyway, great minds think alike!

To me, the defining moment of Lemay's ego came when an interviewer asked him what he had learned from legenday soap writers of the day. Lemay pompously sniffed, "Only what NOT to do!"

That basically says it all. 

Marlowe was my second favorite actor in the role of Jim Matthews (after Shepperd Sttrudwick). I did warm up to HM, and appreciated his presence, but his inability to remember his lines was obvious his own, and not anyone else's fault. Lemay's just wanted to justify his firing of Dwyer by dragging her into the issue. No one else in scenes with her struggled like Marlowe did. And Marlowe DID have trouble with his lines while performing with other actors.

I think HM "went up" more than Jonathan Frid on Dark Shadows, and poor Frid had 20x the dialogue to learn! (I'm not attacking HM, by the way. No one chooses to have memory problems.)

 

 

[Paul Raven]

I'm surprised they didn't cut down on Marlowe's lines and appearances to overcome this issue. 

How often was he on in the mid 70's?

[amybrickwallace]

Ouch.

[vetsoapfan]

The show did start cutting back his lines. By 1979 or 1980, Marlowe would be included in scenes but have little dialogue to recite. An example of this is the episode (available on youtube) in which John Randolph dies. Jim Matthews is in scenes with Aunt Liz and Dan Shearer, but remains largely quiet while the other characters do the majority of the talking. He does get a few lines, but nothing close to the number of everyone else's.

"Ouch" is right. Lemay had been introduced to work by people like Irna Phillips, Agnes Nixon and Henry Slesar, and in his opinion, they only knew what NOT to do? Pffft! Those legendary scribes ruled the roost!

[robbwolff]

I'm still amused by one supposed insider's claim that Lemay had planned a romance between Jim Matthews and Angie Perrini.