Guiding Light Discussion Thread

[soapfan770]

I never really had any issue with FD as Frank or Frank as character for the most part myself either.

As @DRW50 mentioned FD worked fine as a support role. Obviously the best was FD with Melina’s Eleni. But once we got to Frank and Rozell’s Eleni…major snooze and the show just stopped writing for them.

Frank having an affair with Annie Dutton was intriguing but then It just collapsed and nothing further occurred outside of Frank dumping Eleni. 

I do appreciate the later efforts to actually give Frank a love life with Darci, Olivia, and Blake because Frank was literally given nothing to do and was always written off a boring character.

I have to agree to some extent lol. I first saw Josh Taylor on The Hogan Family lol before his Y&R role and GL work. Obviously he was a competent actor at the time but everything with his stint as Roman has just backfired lol minus some chemistry with Leanna Hurley the show didn’t bother to explore.

[Contessa Donatella]

I'm on Day 5 of my petition drive to get a Posthumous Emmy for Beverlee McKinsey. If you haven't signed I urge you to do so! They've given some Posthumous awards & I think Beverlee is exceptionally deserving!! Thanks for your consideration!  https://chng.it/WVxjPPpL82

 

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[DRW50]

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This is a special Martin Short did in 1995 - probably a lot of thrown together unaired bits from his short-lived sketch show (only lasted three episodes). At the start of this, before a middling Models Inc. parody, there's an intro where Martin talks about Guiding Light, claiming the soundstage he's on was where GL originated, and even mentioning how much he loved Papa Bauer. I doubt he grew up watching GL (although maybe it was popular in Canada, I don't know), and this obviously wasn't GL's soundstage (and he says the show had been taping there for 30 years, which isn't possible as the studio is in Hollywood). Some writer probably just knew GL and Papa Bauer so he went with it. Still, it was nice to hear GL mentioned, and in a respectful way. Considering at the time this aired GL was thisclose to being canceled, the nostalgia is especially timely. And you get to see the divine Jan Hooks doing a Faye Dunaway routine that goes into a few different parts of this special.

[Vee]

Frank D. was very hot back in the day. By the time the 2000s or mid-2000s rolled around he was kind of dumpy and sad and was clearly kept around out of loyalty. The same could be said for Michael O'Leary, but amazingly MOL has had a bit of a glow-up recently (a la Michael E. Knight, who has grown out of what I termed his uber-depressed "Suicide Tad" years of the 2000s on AMC). He was a bit of a silver fox in, of all things, Halloween Ends, getting slaughtered by Michael Myers.

Edited August 18, 2023 by Vee

[Paul Raven]

That GL reference was so random...

Here's a TV Guide article from 1969 on Millette Alexander

This lady has a 17 room house, four children, six dogs, seven cats and a soap opera career, too -  by Judith Jobin

“Soap opera at its worst can  be black-and-white—but most of the time the characters are as a real and the conflicts are ones the average person really deals with. I’m proud of it and I'm livid because the industry ignores it. There are no Emmys for soaps!'

So says actress Millette Alexander—looking authentically angry—as she defends her membership in television’s much maligned soap-opera club. And it might smack of a case of sour suds if it came from a lesser talent. But by all accounts, Miss Alexander plays  soaps with a degree of involvement and intensity usually reserved, in an image-conscious profession, for more prestigious theatrical endeavors. The case in point is her latest role, a young, attractive lady doctor. For the past six months Millette has been feeling her way around the psyche of Sara McIntyre, M.D., one of the central characters on CBS’s The Guiding Light. Says producer Peter Andrews: ‘‘She’s quite an intelligent girl and she works very hard in preparation—much more than most. She always has a point of view—she has the whole edifice of her role constructed by the time she gets in.”

On the surface, the action is uncomplicated: Millette puts in upwards of 40 hours a week alternately clucking over patients and getting into clinches with a handsome colleague. But under the clucking and clinching is “much more than the words say,’ insists Edge of Night actress Teri Keane, who remembers Millette’s nimble portrayal of a dual role on that series. “She's complex. There's nothing surfacey about her acting.”” And a Guiding Light actor agrees, pointing admiringly to her ‘‘emotional quicksilver quality.”

But at this point, an inevitable question leaps out: after 15 years of landing television, Broadway and summer-theater roles with ease and regularity, why isn’t Millette Alexander more famous, a little closer to stardom?

“She could definitely have it if she tried,’ declares producer Andrews, confirming that her talent is widely acknowledged in the trade. Teri Keane agrees: ‘‘Absolutely. She's tops. But she doesn’t want it.” And Millette herself, recalling an early offer from 20th Century-Fox, confers a convincing air of distastefulness on the whole business: “They wanted me to sign a seven-year contract, move to California, become a starlet.I didn’t want to be locked in.” Her friend Ed Zimmermann explains: ‘‘l’d say she wants most to do good work.” Finally, Andrews points to her off-stage existence: ‘‘She thinks a lot about her home life.”

By any standard, it’s a life worth thinking about. At 35, she’s married to rangy Jimmy Hammerstein. He is the son of Oscar Hammerstein 2nd, is a respected director in his own right (most recently of a pair of off-Broadway Pinter plays), and was. undeniably a catch. They live in a 17-room Stanford White house in Nyack, N.Y., complete with a six-acre spread of rolling lawns, fruit-tree orchards, greenhouse, lavish swimming pool, and hilltop gazebo overlooking the Hudson River. Their four children are abundantly rosy-cheeked and well-fed. And they solved their servant problem by importing an entire family from Honduras—but the bargain included five more children and an  88-year-old grandmother, all of whom live-in.

After that the law of diminishing returns takes over and things look a bit raffish at the edges. There’s a bright red four-wheel-drive jeep in the driveway, and unwary visitors are assaulted by a friendly tangle of six dogs and seven cats. A tour of the interior turns up stray dolls and hobby horses, jars of freshly made fruit preserves in the kitchen, a pair of well-used pianos, an alarming assortment of electronic instruments and an open Dickens volume in the bathroom. Not to mention sound effects—the indecorous clatter of nine children, plus sputtering balloon sounds and Indian yells.

It all looks disarmingly like a television headache commercial featuring Millette as its miscast heroine. As keeper of the house and grounds, and Big Mama to that brood, she’s more like the earthy old lady who lived in a shoe than an other-worldly Cinderella. ‘‘! don’t even nose-count any more,” she laughs.

“She looks like quite a socialite,” says Teri Keane, ‘‘but she can get down there in the garden and weed!” And that’s not just a figure of speech. In off hours, Millette weeds with gusto, dips deeply into art and music (she’s a highly skilled pianist, also plays violin), finds time for exquisite needlepoint projects and generally has a disconcerting affinity for over-achievement. “She's got a helluva lot of energy,”’ says one friend, and another adds, “It must be pretty exhausting.”

Which raises a final question: How did an admittedly ‘“‘overly sensible’’ teenager from the Great Neck (Long Island) High School Orchestra find her way from first-chair violin to the center of such a helter-skelter life?

“I finally got sensible about myself,” she explains happily.

[Vee]

Millette Alexander's EON role has always fascinated me from reading up about it on the old EON fan site back in the day. I never saw any of her on GL until much long after. She was a stalwart presence. I don't know if Kevin Bacon has ever talked about her when referencing his time on the show (not that I've ever heard of him talk about it much at all) - didn't he play her ward?

[Paul Raven]

Yes TJ (Tim) was a young boy that Sara and then husband Joe adopted in the mid 70's.

They never followed through with a reveal of who his real parents were.

[DRW50]

Thanks @Paul Raven 

That "servant problem" section makes you clench your teeth. 

Milette always does seem so regal and intelligent to me, even in an era with more thoughtful soap acting. Glad to see this was a common view.

Her home life sounds like a headache - I'm not surprised that marriage did not last much longer.

[~bl~]

Supposedly GL for a time while on radio was produced in California I read that many years ago so can’t source it. Does anyone else have a recollection of this or was it some wild theory to explain the show moving location within the story?

[Contessa Donatella]

California was one of the fictional locations, not physical locations. 

[Paul Raven]

No.

When The Guiding Light returned to radio in 1947 after a break the new show was set in California and produced in Hollywood.

It then returned to New York for the rest of its radio and tv broadcasts.

Another Irna Phillips soap Masquerade was also broadcast from Hollywood at that time.

 

[danfling]

In the article above (about Millette Alexander) mentions producer Peter Andrews.   I don't remember ever hearing that name before.    I did watch The Guiding Light at the time that this article was published and may have seen the name Peter Andrews in the credits (but I don't remember).

In the IMDb, Peter Andrews has five acting credits:   two in 1966, one in 1967, one for 1966-1969, and one in 1972.   I suspect that all of these acting roles may have been on British television.

There is no reference that I have been able to find about producer Peter Andrews.

[vetsoapfan]

The only comment Kevin Bacon made about TGL which has always stuck in my mind is, "The more I did it, the worse it got."

Pffft.

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[Contessa Donatella]

Yes, I knew about her Hollywood experiment. I just mistook it for the fictional location, sorry. 

@danfling Peter Anthony Andrews. Sorry this is IMDb.

So, it does seem that there is an imminently quotable producer called Peter Andrews. 

Edited August 19, 2023 by Donna L. Bridges
combine 2 posts

[j swift]

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These days, Kevin Bacon does ads for the International House of Pancakes on TikTok, so I don't know that he qualifies as an arbiter of good taste.

 

 

Edited August 19, 2023 by j swift