From, http://soapoperadigest.com/news/breaking/

Soap Icon Dies

Jacqueline Courtney (ex-Pat, OLTL et al), best known to viewers as ANOTHER WORLD's über-popular Alice, passed away on December 20 of metastatic melanoma. "Any letter that she wrote to people recently ended with, 'Stay out of the sun. Wear sunscreen,' " her daughter, Jennifer, tells Digest. "She was very healthy her whole life and then suddenly everything just started snowballing. She went really quickly. She had just turned 64, so she was still pretty young." Jennifer reports that her beloved mother still kept up with the goings-on in daytime. "She still read Soap Opera Weekly. She loved her Soap Opera Weekly!"

Thanks for sharing those clips. She was very natural is the role of Pat... I do not see what Rauch's concerns about her acting are. Maybe the standards were just higher then?

I can't believe that a man who has ruined as many soaps as he has saved like Rauch could have so much power as to dictate a cast cleansing prior to taking over (for example, with Jacqui at OLTL). It is sad because when the morale behind the scenes on a show is low, you can see it translate onscreen (like in 2006-2007 when someone at AMC banned the "goodbye cake" ceremony, and many people were dropped without final episodes).

I think Lemay said that she was not a talented actress, and she just had charisma (he said Susan Harney was more talented but didn't have the charisma - not his exact words).

I think she was a good enough actress with quite a bit of star power, and that can carry you far. When I see the few clips of her work as Alice from pre and during Lemay's era that are available she seems fine to me. She's not the best, but she does a good job of playing a straightforward heroine who also has some complex emotions. It's easy to relate to her yet she also has a certain mysterious quality about her.

I think that Lemay probably did not want to relate to someone like Alice. I'm sure that she must have bored him silly. I think he also had a very specific type of acting style that he might have preferred, and that helped influence AW in those years (and Rauch's own casting decisions too). It's funny because I have seen some of the episodes after John Randolph died, this wasn't all that long after Lemay was gone, and the Matthews family, aside from some exquisite work from Irene Dailey, just dissolved into a very generic, almost cliched hooting and hollering, weeping screamfests. I couldn't help wondering how much more effective this might have been if Courtney's more understated pain had been on display (John died saving Alice's life).

Edited January 4, 201114 yr by CarlD2

HL also found RS a little one-note while VW multi-dimensional, so there's really no accounting for taste.

I don't know about Bob Woods, but Clint Ritchie made it abundantly clear that he'd had many issues working with Barbara Luna who he considered insane. Any time the soap mags seemed to ask him about hard times on OLTL, he would bring up Barbara Luna and how he'd barely survived, or something.

I have heard a few other yarns about Barbara Luna from other shows which I only vaguely recall. But there were a lot of rumors about Ritchie having issues with other women, and Erika Slezak has been fairly candid in saying they had their differences, but was very classy about him when he passed and has always been very complimentary of him as an actor. From what I've gleaned over the years, CR was a talented man with demons and flaws, like many of us. I don't approve of some of the things I've heard, but I separate that from the Clint Buchanan I watched onscreen - he was one of a kind.

As for Jacquie Courtney, often when people think of her on OLTL they think of how the show (or rather Joe Stuart) tried to use her to force out Viki and install Pat as the heroine of the show. Wrongheaded though it was, he could potentially have gotten away with it as Courtney played a very classy professional woman with style, grace and above all dignity and intelligence. In my past pipe dreams about bringing a recast Tony Lord back someday, I thought about whether Ms. Courtney might have returned for a couple days as Pat Ashley to bring closure to their story. Now it would have to be Tony mourning his lost love, again.

That's so sad. So what was Joe Stuart's deal with JC, had they worked together in the past? Did he have something against ES or did he just envision a new day, a new dawn with Pat as the show's lead? I get confused with all of the tidbits of behind the scenes romance, it wasn't Jacqeline and Joe who were involved, was it?

Yes, Jacqui and Joe Stuart were involved. I remember Marlena De La Croix telling the story of some soap magazine inadvertently publishing a photo that displayed Joe Stuart's photo on the bedside table in Jacqui's bedroom. It was this relationship rather than anything that actually transpired on screen that led to accusations that Courtney was being positioned to replace Slezak.

I was under the impression that ES/Viki was off a bit during the late '70s/early '80s, however, while Pat dallied with both Clint and Bo.

I was under the impression that ES/Viki was off a bit during the late '70s/early '80s, however, while Pat dallied with both Clint and Bo.

Christine Jones briefly replaced her while Erika gave birth to her son Michael in 1981. That's the only one I (vaguely) remember.

I didn't want to post a lot of Jacquie Courtney stuff because I thought it would get repetitive, as these magazines sometimes were, but since Jacquie and Nancy Pinkerton passed in the same year, this caught my eye.

September 1977 Daylight TV.

Great piece--great to see about Jackie but also great to read so much about Nancy!

There's more to come!

That was awesome. The things you'd have never thought even existed, a Courtney and Pinkerton interview, and they were buds at that! So nice. Wish I knew these ladies. Wish I knew who needed a moving fan for all their [!@#$%^&*].

Edited January 13, 201114 yr by SFK

For some reason I have a feeling it was a Cathy Craig...who knows...

I enjoyed the interview, I'm glad you did too. It's actually very rare for these soap magazines. There was nothing about star signs, romance, or how they fixed their lives through therapy or about how they met a dog in 1957 and their lives were never the same. It's so much fun. The laughs and friendship between them. I cracked up when Jacquie was humming "First Time Ever I Saw Your Face." And the stuff about Jacquie's habits in a dressing room, and Jacquie begging her not to talk about that.

I love Robin Strasser but I still always feel like OLTL lost something special when Nancy Pinkerton was fired (I know she wasn't fired for Robin Strasser, I mean Robin took over as Dorian after Malis replaced Pinkerton). I wish they could have brought her back in for some role. It's kind of sad when she says that part about always assuming she will be fired without much notice, and then she was.

Exactly. In her book, Ellen Holly talks about how she maintained a bare bones dressing room for that very reason and how Lillian Hayman really made hers a home away from home (and of course you know the rest of that sad story).

But yeah, a totally fun interview, and honest, not two hotshots trying to sound clever, cool, and "natural" as we're accustomed to. I totally agree with you about NP, and looking at her I realized how she was quite an attractive lady in an unobvious way (I really do mean that as a compliment ). She has beautiful eyes and soft features but her hair was a little Angela Channing (an interesting comparison as Marlena described her as Nancy Reagan-like in an article ).

Being that I was a child of the 80's, I didn't get the pleasure to truly see her act (barring some you-tube videos and such). I was wondering if there were any differences between Alice and Pat?

You mean differences between the characters, or the actresses? I don't know how the actresses got on, but the main difference between Pat and Alice seemed to be that Alice was a more straightforward heroine while Pat was more troubled, with a long history of mental illness. She was also put into more complex stories, like alcoholism, and killing her daughter's boyfriend because he reminded her of the man who'd had her get an abortion years ago.