The Soap Opera World Mourns Recent Losses

 

Soap Opera Mourns Recent Losses:

It has been a heartbreaking time for those of us who love daytime TV.  Five of our beloved actors and three top-rated soap journalists have left us in recent months. We Soap Opera Weekly alumni have lost our beloved managing editor Robert Shorke, 51, and features editor Katie “Caelie” Haines, 54.  Robert Rorke, 68, who also passed away, was once an editor at Soap Opera Digest, and later TV editor of The New York Post.

Oh, the actors we lost from our screens almost all at once!  The distinguished Nicolas Coster left us at 89. Andrea Evans, 66, played Tina Lord with such comic panache on One Life to Live.  We also lost Arleen Sorkin, 68, another a comic gem who was a hoot as Kalliope Jones on Days of Our Lives with her foil Eugene (John de Lancie). We will miss Nancy Frangione, 70, who played Cecile on Another World.  And tragically, Billy Miller, who added so much charm to All My Children, The Young and Restless and All My Children, took his own life at 43.

I knew all of them and worked with some. There is so much to be said about each of them, and not nearly enough space here to do them justice. So, I will share my memories and appreciation in a series of posts in coming weeks.  This week I will begin with …

Nicolas Coster

I am sure I speak for all serious soap opera fans when I say we are very proud to have had Nicolas Coster among us, our Prince of Players whose amazing 70-year career on stage and screen is best remembered for his roles on soaps. Start with the irresistible Lionel Lockridge on Santa Barbara, from 1984 to 1988, then from 1990 until the show’s demise in 1993. He played executive Robert Delaney on Another World and its spin-off Somerset. He was Spanish romancer Eduardo Grimaldi on As the World Turns and won a Daytime Emmy in 2017 as the good guy mayor on Wendy Riche’s The Bay. The list goes on: The Secret Storm, One Life to Live, Young Doctor Malone, All My Children, and more.

As you all know, he earned other kudos along the way, too. Big ones. He appeared on Broadway in The Little Foxes with fellow soap fan Elizabeth Taylor (remember her placing a curse on Luke and Laura in her General Hospital guest spot?). And he understudied Sir Lawrence Olivier in Becket, eventually becoming a “Sir” himself when he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth. Indeed, theater was in his blood. A graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, he supported America’s resident professional theater community as a regular at Washington’s Arena Stage, and as a founding member of Minneapolis’ Guthrie Theater. Hollywood beckoned, too, casting him in important character roles in such hits as All the President’s Men, MacArthur, Warren Beatty’s Reds and Sidney Poitier’s Stir Crazy. And prime time television snared him for the sitcom The Facts of Life.

The rest of the time, he kept busy as working actors do, with an astonishing list of film and television credits that would be the envy of any colleague in the business: a procession of doctors and executives and officials and what-have-you, many of them in an astonishing list of made-for-tv movies. He wasn’t above doing a commercial when the need arose, either.

A fan named David who read about his passing on the Deadline Hollywood website offered this amusing memory: Sir Nicolas as the fellow in the early ‘70s Geritol commercial who happily delivered the tagline, “My wife. I think I’ll keep her.”

He was unfailingly courtly and always kind to everyone. I was privileged to have a dinner interview with him at Sardi’s Broadway Bar, where we sat under his portrait. He spoke lovingly of his craft, of the Broadway world he adored, and of the variety of roles he was called upon to play over the years. And he took special pleasure in telling these stories under Sardi’s portrait of him.

Marlena vastly admires those actors who, as she has often said, clearly want the audience to see them thinking.  At which he succeeded magnificently.