Original Actor vs. Recast.

[MoTheGreat]

CK & LK reminds me of each other. They both put themselves in situations. Then they whines about it & the audience suppose to feel sorry for them. I dislike how LK played Theresa & CK plays Lily.

[Dr Neil Curtis]

I agree, Jerry's Clint is more like a new character.

Like someone said in an earlier post, I couldn't see Robin Strasser playing the rachel of the 80' and 90's.

[SFK]

I think Robin would have been bored to tears playing Viki-fied Rachel. It would have been interesting to see Robin and Beverlee McKinsey face off back in the day though.

[Khan]

I disagree; I think Robin Strasser would have enjoyed playing a reformed Rachel (or at least, she would've until the mid-'90's, when even Victoria Wyndham was sick of her, lol). Rachel, for the most part, never lost her spark even after she'd stopped being so needy. Plus, I don't think RS is averse to playing "white hats", per se; she just wants characters that have backbone, something her AMC character, Dr. Christina Karras, clearly didn't.

[DRW50]

They ran Rachel through the gauntlet, especially during the 80s, to try to come up with story for her, but Wyndham always managed to elevate cliched material by adding a real edge. You were still terrified of Rachel if you crossed her. Rachel also seemed to feel her emotions very deeply and with a lasting pain, which Strasser has always brought to Dorian.

I can't imagine her in the Justine days though...

[Khan]

That wouldn't have happened. If La Strasser had still been Rachel when the idea came up (to have her play Justine as well), Carolyn Culliton (or whoever was HW'ing at that point) would have taken one look at Robin and said, "Oh, hell no," lol.

[DRW50]

I can never remember if that was one of those stories that was knocked off from JER. Since he gave her a role on Passions, as Hecuba, I wonder if he would have had any ideas for her as Rachel.

I think you're right though, up to about 1995, when JFP sucked the life out of the character, Rachel was still very interesting. After that it mostly just became about any random scraping together for Rachel...like when she gunned down that horrible Nikos character. And when he put her in a sarcophagus, although Rachel seemed subdued about all that.

By then I think Wyndham would have preferred just going oncamera and reading from Couplets.

[Khan]

IMO, having post-menopausal Rachel pregnant w/ Carl's twins - and then having her go into labor after stupidly trying to chase off a bird with a broomstick or some [!@#$%^&*], only to get knocked over the couch by the ceiling fan (!) - was the absolute lowest for the girl. If I had been VW, I would've walked off the set that day and not look back, loss of income and potential lawsuit be damned.

[DRW50]

That probably was the low point, although at least it was material (which is that horrible argument Eddie Drueding talked about when he said people shouldn't have accepted the John/Felicia romance just because it gave them a story). Didn't they try to say Carl had sold his soul to the devil for the twins and he was going to have to pay? That story ended up going nowhere...although after her Loving story, Agnes Nixon could have returned to ghost write it.

The story, or non-story, near the end where she mainly just walked around that empty Cory mansion talking about missing payroll money (for a company we had not seen in years and years, which I assume was being run by Aunt Liz at that point), that was what depressed me the most. And for some reason I was always annoyed that the mansion had no servants. I always had a hard time believing Rachel would answer her own door. I saw her as someone who, by those last years, was likely to pour scalding water on people if they rang the doorbell too often.

[Khan]

Well, they had servants at the Cory mansion, but try to replace actors like Anne Meacham (sp?) with even dayplayers and the audience would have cried foul.

Plus, do you remember how small and cheap the sets on ANOTHER WORLD were by the end? If I had been Rachel's major domo, and she had asked me to see who was at the door, I would've pulled a Florence Johnston ("The Jeffersons") and said, "Why? It's just as close to you as it is to me!"

[SFK]

Hmmm, I dunno Khan, I have indeed heard RS mention the white hat/black hat thing but the black hat is certainly her favorite hat to wear and she has been since elementary school plays. I wonder how she would have reacted to Lemay's plans for Rachel had she still been in the role. Lemay has criticized her acting anyway, saying that she's kind of one-note compared to VW, but I wonder if RS would have resisted losing her spot as the show's heavy. Who knows... But I do know that she wanted a slice of what Lucci was getting to serve on Children, something she couldn't do on the same show as Cristina and that's why she grabbed Dorian by the throat and the character became somewhat of her own invention.

I hypothesize that RS's Rachel would have would have become more confident having married well, having had some of those dreams come true as Lemay said, but with Strasser in the role, she would have maintained a certain degree of neuroses, humor, and a wardrobe rivaling Felicia's (maybe there wouldn't have even been a Felicia ). From the handful of episodes I've seen, VW's early Rachel could be a real bitch, the Doberman to Strasser's standard poodle, all crazy wide-eyed and nasty. I've never seen RS play "scary" like that. And VW's Rachel continued to be "take no [!@#$%^&*]" for all of her kindness.

[DRW50]

Now Strasser is probably wishing she'd never stopped playing Rachel

[Khan]

Frankly, what actor doesn't prefer playing "the heavy"? Even Ilene Kristen, who's always preferred comedy over melodrama, has said she wanted RYAN'S HOPE's Delia to be someone who could get under audiences' skins, but who was fascinating nonetheless.

And I'm sure Strasser cries about that every time she picks up her Emmy. One, by the way, Wyndham never got. ;-)

Again, what actor wouldn't want to be in La Lucci's expensive designer pumps? Actors aren't fools, after all. As much as soaps need the Bert Bauers and Nancy Hugheses, it's the Erica Kanes and Dorian Lords we always talk about whenever we talk about the shows w/ our best friends.

Exactly. ;-)

[SFK]

Agreed on all, I think we're on the same page. Just given the choice, Robin would obviously go with Dorian as she's turned out over Rachel as she turned out (and I'm not even talking pesky matters such as show cancellation ).

I'd love to see VW do a six month arc as Dorian's first cousin who's the mastermind behind some sort of scheme that would have Dorian and Viki reluctantly partner to take her down. I'd be just as excited to see Victoria and Erika chewing one another out as Victoria and Robin.

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And can Carmen Duncan come out to play too? She can be Viki's first cousin.

[DRW50]

They could have cast Vicky as Melinda, they could still do it, say that Melinda faked her death, or someone else faked it.

I'd love to see Carmen Duncan on the show too, imagine her as Viki's kin, or as an old friend of Renee's from the life.

If they can't be on OLTL then I'd like Rauch to cast Vicky on Y&R as a lunatic who bumps off the show's worst detritus (although Rauch and I probably wouldn't agree on that list...).