Daytime Emmy Winners No Longer With Us

[kalbir]

The recent passing of Kristoff St. John has me thinking about the other Daytime Emmy winners whom are no longer with us. I listed the ones I'm aware of below in date order of their wins:

 

Macdonald Carey - Lead Actor 1974, 1975

Larry Haines - Lead Actor 1976; Supporting Actor 1981

Val Dufour - Lead Actor 1977

James Pritchett - Lead Actor 1978

Al Freeman Jr. - Lead Actor 1979

Irene Dailey - Lead Actress 1979

Peter Hansen - Supporting Actor 1979

Douglass Watson - Lead Actor 1980, 1981

Warren Burton - Supporting Actor 1980

David Lewis - Supporting Actor 1982

Larry Gates - Supporting Actor 1985

David Canary - Lead Actor 1986, 1988, 1989, 1993, 2001

Justin Gocke - Younger Actor 1989

Bernard Barrow - Supporting Actor 1991

Kristoff St. John - Younger Actor 1992; Supporting Actor 2008

Gerald Anthony - Supporting Actor 1993

Michael Zaslow - Lead Actor 1994

Charles Keating - Lead Actor 1996

Benjamin Hendrickson - Supporting Actor 2003

Jeanne Cooper - Lead Actress 2008

 

I thought we could use this thread to remember their best work.

[Faulkner]

Wow. All of the Supporting Actress winners are still alive, with two from the Lead category gone (compared to the numbers for Lead/Supporting Actors and even Younger Actors with KSJ and Justin Gocke). Certainly it’s sad that a late legend like Beverlee McKinsey was never honored by her peers with soaps’ biggest trophy.

 

I loved Zaslow’s Emmy speech.

 

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You can see the love from Hendrickson’s castmates when he won his Emmy (made even more retrospectively bittersweet that it was handed out by John Ritter shortly before he suddenly passed):

 

 

[kalbir]

 

Agreed. Beverlee McKinsey not getting a nomination for her work on GL is easily the most egregious error by the Daytime Emmys. She could've easily won in 1991, 1992, 1993 as the Lead Actress races in those years were rather weak. I know Beverlee was nominated four consecutive years (1977-1980) for Another World but for whatever reason she didn't get a win then either.

 

Another actor no longer with us whom I feel should've gotten a Daytime Emmy was Terry Lester. He was Y&R's first Daytime Emmy acting nominee and he had four consecutive Lead Actor nominations (1984-1987) but the competition those years was tough.

[DeeeDee]

 

The most egregious error of the Daytime Emmys is having only 2 women of color winning. Ever.

[Faulkner]

And then all the other women like Constance Ford, Nancy Addison, Eileen Herlie, Darlene Conley, et al. The Daytime Emmys are similar to many other acting awards (like the Oscars) in that older men are celebrated while older woman seldom are. (Not that Addison was older before her sad passing from cancer, but a lot of the earlier male winners on your list were quite up there in years: Carey, Haines, Dufour, Pritchett, Hansen, Barrow, Watson, Lewis were all born before 1930–and some before 1920. Of the female winners, only Cooper, Dailey, and the still-living Helen Gallagher were born before 1930.)

And only one ever nominated as a Lead (Debbi Morgan), right? Especially when Ellen Holly, Tamara Tunie, Renee Elise Goldsberry, Renee Jones, several Y&R actresses, and many others have done worthy leading work.

[DramatistDreamer]

Probably the only thing that can get me to watch this year is to see that one final salute to Kristoff St. John at this year's Emmys. More often than not, the Emmys have failed to recognize many of the best actresses out there, which has left me bitterly disappointed. 

In its finest hour daytime has done some excellent work telling some types of stories but considering how bad the genre is at telling other types of stories, I cannot say that I'm terribly surprised though.

[Faulkner]

I remember this in 2004 when all of these iconic older soap legends were given lifetime achievement trophies because they’d never won competitive awards. (Jeanne later won one.) It was a nice moment, but also shameful considering who can count themselves as Daytime Emmy winners. Thankfully, several of them (Hastings, Fulton, MacDonnell, Ames) are still with us.

 

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[~bl~]

When I think about who won and when I remind myself of how people got nominated in the first place before the mess that is prenominations and with only four soaps (the possibility that you can actually know your peers unlike when it was two coasts and a dozen or so shows). There was a book of performers' names, their show, and character listed (I don't know if there was a picture or not depending on what year it was). So everything was based on name recognition to even get to the blue ribbon panel...and in the early years I doubt most of the actors even taped their own shows, (Beta was new in the 70s). 

 

The wins of the lead actor tending to be older makes perfect sense from that POV as people within the industry knew of them even if they had not worked at that particular soap. Also there is the issue of show popularity within the genre, some performers their shows were less popular during the years of their best performances or they were huge prior to the Daytime Emmys (so no way of getting an award). Days was shut out for the most part for the 90s for example and in the early Daytime Emmy years there were complaints about bias based on network and coast. So it is a complete mess.