Soap stars are routinely asked to enact a whole host of trying situations – playing drunk, losing a lover, enduring a brutal attack, death-bed confessions, and even kidnappings. But some daytime players (and members of their family) have experienced these ills first hand.
Which Soap Star Was It?
All of these actors are either currently starring in, or alums of, one of the four remaining soaps – The Bold and the Beautiful, Days of our Lives, General Hospital, and The Young and the Restless. But only one of them is able to recount a truly chilling tale in which they nearly fell prey to a kidnapper.
But who can that actor be? Was it Lesley-Anne Down (Jackie Marone, BB), Lisa Rinna (ex-Billie Reed, DAYS), Genie Francis (Laura Collins, GH), or Tracey Bregman (Lauren Fenmore Baldwin, YR)?
Lisa Rinna
Though Rinna never avoided a near kidnapping, her mother, Lois, once recalled how she had been abducted by a co-worker who possessed both lascivious and violent intentions.
Lois managed to escape from her predicament relatively unscathed – thanks in part to the appearance of a military policeman – and the man was sentenced to a lengthy prison sentence. But the story does not end there. Upon his release – some seven years later – Lois’s attacker went on a killing spree that would last between August 19, 1979, to May 2, 1981, and earn him the moniker The Trailside Killer.
Genie Francis
Francis, luckily, remained unbothered by fiendish person snatchers, but the same can not be said for her fictional counterpart. The newly married Laura Spencer found herself an abductee of the Cassadine family and she was marooned on their eponymous Greek island for a number of years alongside the treacherous Stavros and the more refined and gentle Stefan.
Tracey Bregman
Like Francis, what Bregman avoided in her personal life, her character experienced manifold. In the mid-1980s, budding songstress Lauren found herself kidnapped by an obsessed fan who eventually buried her alive! She was subsequently held against her will by Sheila (on numerous occasions), Rush Carrera, Tom Fisher, and Sarah Smythe.
Lesley-Anne Down
“I was almost kidnapped,” Down admitted to The Mirror, a daily British publication. “I’d run ahead of my mother. When she caught up, the man had stopped me, told me he needed a babysitter and we would call my parents when we got to his house.
“I remember having one foot in the car. Seeing my mother broke the spell. I screamed. My mother ran to me and told me to run to my father. He called the police. Of course, my mother couldn’t hold him…he was gone.”
To compound the resulting panic felt by the Down family, the body of a 10-year-old child – Lesley-Anne Downey – had just been found inside a shallow grave. She would later be identified as the fourth victim of serial killers Myra Hindley and Ian Brady.
So, if you guessed that the soap star in question was Lesley-Anne Down, then you were absolutely correct.
