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Losing Meredith was a major blow to OLTL. Over the years, it became absurd how many of Viki's family members dropped dead around her. Killing off Meredith Lord, Tony Lord, Victor Lord (and reconning the story to turn him into a degenerate psychopath) decimated one of the series' core, founding families and it was sad to see.

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I always wished they'd done more with her - or brought her back later on since everyone else came back from the dead. Of course they would have just made her a psycho.

 

I love that shot of Nancy Pinkerton.

Edited by DRW50
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Meredith was such a sweet character, and an important part of two core families (the Lords by "birth" and the Woleks, by marriage), I could never understand why they killed her off instead of mining more story potential for her. Victor Lord was apparently not Meri's biological father, and the show could have used that point to spin various, interesting scenarios for the Lord family. Maybe the writers wanted to free up Larry Wolek for other romances, and he did end up having an amazing storyline with Karen a few years later.

 

Nancy Pinkerton was a great Dorian. Have you have the opportunity to see much of her work? Some episodes with her are on youtube. Of all the characters on soaps who have been recast many times, I'd say OLTL had the most success with Dorian. All five actresses who played the role were very good.

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I didn't know that Meredith and Melinda were close friends.  That's quite an ironic nugget of history that could have been mentioned during one of Viki and Dorian's many encounters in subsequent decades.

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Interview with character actor Fred Melamed with a mention of OLTL

http://www.avclub.com/article/fred-melamed-casual-coens-and-making-larry-david-l-229369

One Life To Live (1981-1982)—“Alberto Cervantes”

AVC: You mentioned earlier that you got your start in theater, but it looks like your first on-camera role was playing Alberto Cervantes in One Life To Live.

FM: Yes, I think that was my first time on camera! My first film was calledLovesick, with Dudley Moore, but I think that was after that.

Well, what happened was that I went to the Guthrie right after I got out of drama school, as I mentioned to you, and when that season was over, I came back to New York and I got the job as a recurring character on One Life To Live, which at the time was already a very venerated and beloved soap opera. But, yeah, that was my first on-camera experience at all. When I went to drama school, we weren’t given any instruction at all in anything other than theater acting, the presumption—the probably incorrect assumption—being that if you could handle the theater, then everything else should come sort of naturally or easily. I’m not so sure that that idea is borne out by reality, but nonetheless we were given no instructions in acting in any other milieu. So I got this job on the soap opera, and I was extremelynervous in front of the camera. [Laughs.]

There was a guy who was one of the leads in the soap opera, a very nice guy called Michael Storm, and I had a lot of my scenes with him. The storyline was that there was a couple who was looking to adopt a baby in Llanview, the fictional town in Pennsylvania where all the action took place, and I was from a fictional Central American country, some country that was supposed to be around Honduras but didn’t actually exist. But I would heroically steward unwanted children out of the country there and set them up for adoptions for people in the United States who wanted to adopt babies. So I was introduced with that as kind of my main function, and then I developed a love interest with somebody who’d been on the show for a long time.

Anyway, I had a lot of my scenes with this guy Michael Storm, who was a lovely guy, but he had been on the show for probably 20 years or more already, and, well, you know, he took it seriously, but 20 years on a show is a long time! [Laughs.] And he realized that I was very easy to make laugh, and I’d crack up.One Life To Live was an hour show, and we had to shoot an hour show every day, five days a week, so you really had to slog through a lot of stuff and learn a lot of lines to do an hour show a day. And he realized that I was an easy mark, and he had this method—I don’t know how he did it—where he used to look at me and cross his upstage eye, so that the camera couldn’t see it, but anybody acting with him couldn’t help but see it. So once he realized that I was easy to get to crack up, he did it quite a few times. And after this had happened several times, I remember hearing when I was in the makeup chair somebody talking about it, saying, “Well, maybe he’s just a happy guy.” And the other guy said, “Yeah, but it’s costing a lot of money, because we keep having to repeat takes!” So I got the idea that I should kind of get it together.

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Thanks for sharing that!  I'm so sad that the New York soap opera has gone the way of the dodo.  I'm sure there are a million stories like this one.  As an actor who works primarily in the theatre, I'm really sad that I never had the chance to be a part of that community.  They'll be back someday in some shape or form, though.  I just may be an Asa instead of a Ford (God willing!).

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Jeff Fahey talks Gary Corelli

One Life To Live (1982-1985)—“Gary Corelli”

http://www.avclub.com/article/jeff-fahey-is-just-as-baffled-by-ilost-ias-the-res-83762
JF: Oh my gosh. Yeah, One Life To Live, that was fantastic, because I was part of a theater group doing off-off-Broadway shows, and I’d done a few Broadway shows, but getting Gary Corelli on One Life To Live helped me finance some of the plays I was involved in with the theater group at the Raft Theater on 42nd Street. So that was great for two reasons. First, it was great to have a job and to afford to get my own place in New York and not sleep on the floor in a loft with 10 other people. [Laughs.] So that was very exciting, to have this big paycheck like that. But I learned a lot working on a soap, dealing with whatever it was, 12 or 15 hours a day, pumping out and being a part of a complete script every day. I learned quite a bit. And, you know, there were a lot of people working on soaps back then that went on to… I mean, Tommy Lee Jones had just worked on it before, and Meg Ryan was working down the street and Alec Baldwin was working up the street. All kinds of cats were working on soaps at the time that moved on to other things. But it was a very exciting time early in my career to have a steady paycheck. 

AVC: Have any of Gary’s storylines stuck with you as particular favorites?

JF: No, not really. It was all just part of the whole training ground. The stories and storylines themselves don’t necessarily stick out.

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