For Patrick Duffy and Linda Purl, the road to love was a long one — literally! The Bold and the Beautiful actors traveled a great distance to find a beautiful romance together. Duffy and Purl talked to Soap Hub about how they first met and how they eventually got together.
Duffy and Purl have been acting professionally since the 1970s. He surfaced on the action series “Man from Atlantis” and then, of course, became a household name on the primetime soap opera “Dallas” as beloved Bobby Ewing. Purl had stints on “Happy Days” as Fonzie’s girlfriend, Ashley Pfister, and appeared on numerous other shows, including the highly-rated TV movie of the week “Little Ladies of the Night” in 1977, which shined a light on teen prostitution. The couple nearly were cast on the same series — “Young Pioneers” — but Duffy joined the cast of “Dallas” instead.
“A good 20 years had passed before [we met] when a mutual friend wanted a staged reading of a play,” Duffy tells Soap Hub. “Then, we were in the same room [but] I can hardly remember meeting her. Then, another 10 years went by, and she came to see a friend of hers in a play I was doing in London. It was, ‘Hi, Patrick, I’m Linda’ and ‘Hi, Linda, I’m Patrick.’ We never saw each other again until three years ago.”
That’s when Purl came to an event to see Duffy’s co-star Linda Gray (ex-Sue Ellen Ewing, Dallas; ex-Priscilla Kelly, B&B). “Our [other] mutual connection was Richard Thomas [ex-John Boy, The Waltons; ex-Tom Hughes, As the World Turns],” Duffy adds. “I gave my phone number to her to get it to Richard.”
“I gave Richard Patrick’s phone number, and the three of us were in a group text,” Purl says. “In February 2020, there was a slight possibility Patrick was going to visit New York, and I said, ‘It’d be great for us to get together.’ Then, the pandemic hit. That was the end of that.”
Destiny, as usual, had other ideas. Soon, Duffy and Purl started to learn about FaceTime and Zoom — and each other. He was isolated in Oregon. Purl had hunkered down in Colorado. “Everyone was stuck at home, and we all had a lot of time,” Purl says. “[Patrick and I] started Zooming two to three hours a night for months. We said when this ends, let’s see if we can be in Los Angeles at the same time. At one point, Patrick heroically got in his car and drove 23 hours from Oregon to Colorado, and we’ve been together ever since.”
Purl greeted Duffy with some self-proclaimed butterflies and a sign that read “Welcome Patrick.” Duffy shares: “I got out of the car, and we stood about 10 feet apart. I said, ‘May I kiss you?’ I unpacked, and I’ve never left. I’m like that guest you can’t get rid of!”
Don’t miss Duffy’s return to B&B as Stephen Logan and Purl’s debut as Stephen’s girlfriend, Lucy on Wednesday, November 23.
The Bold and the Beautiful airs weekdays on CBS. For an in-depth look at the show’s history, click here.
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