Excerpt from a 1980 article about soap stars
Ron Arrants (Travis Tourneur Santell on Search for Tomorrow) describes his character “as a romantic with dimensions, a combination of Rhett Butler, Howard Hughes and Citizen Kane the younger. He inherited an international business conglomerate, he is classical straight arrow. He flies his own jet and speaks several languages. On Lovers and Friends, I was just a millionaire. Now I’m a BILLIONAIRE.”
Arrants’ character fell in love with Liza when her husband died and the couple went through just about every conceivable tragedy until their TV marriage last December. “WE HAVE HAD 10 major obstacles to our relationship,” he has figured out. A major star of daytime, Arrants still rides the subway from his Brqpklyn Heights home to CBS in New York but it gets more difficult daily to study his lines during the 20-minute ride. Autograph seekers are the interruptions. A native Californian, he has transplanted comfortably for a good economic reason: “I work 305 days a year, and have for 10 years. Elven though there’s nothing here for actors except daytime and the stage, it’s good experience, and I’m grateful for the work. It’s a good life, and I feel a responsibility to stay in daytime, after barely getting by for so long. But I have the economic freedom to take the risk again if I ever want to.
“Actors who think of themselves as artists, who have an impulse to stretch and grow, find an excitement and challenge they can only experience in soaps. There is no beginning, middle or end in daytime. You never have that sense of completion you get in the theater. “TO THE EXTENT that an actor can feel secure, I am. I even get two paid vacation every year.That came as a big surprise,” he laughs
By
Paul Raven ·
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