Soap Hub Flashback Friday: Colleen Zenk Recalls ATWT’s Simply Barbara

Villainous Aunt Jordan on The Young and the Restless is a departure for Colleen Zenk, best known to viewers as Barbara Ryan on As the World Turns. However, Zenk does know more than a little about taking a character to a more assertive level. She chatted with Soap Hub recently about her mid-1980s transformation that brought Barbara from victim/heroine to the mistress of manipulation.

Colleen Zenk: Simply the Best

Zenk joined ATWT in 1978 as the fourth actress to play the role of Barbara. For her first several years on the show, Zenk played out standard heroine soap opera fare. Barbara tearfully left her groom, Tom Hughes, at the altar after James Stenbeck (Anthony Herrera) reappeared in her life with news about their son Paul (Danny Pintauro).

That all changed when Douglas Marland became ATWT’s head writer. After Barbara lost Gunnar (Hugo Napier), who died, and Brian McColl (Mark Pinter), who dumped her for Shannon (Margaret Reed), Barbara had an epiphany and became determined to never feel like a victim again. When Tom (Gregg Marx) informed Barbara he was going to drop her as a client because he was attracted to her, Barbara decided to let a drunken Tom believe that they’d had sex (they had not), nearly ruining his marriage to Margo (Hillary B. Smith) in the process.

“I remember sitting in [executive producer] Robert Calhoun’s office and talking to both him and Doug as they tried to help me through this transition,” Zenk tells Soap Hub. “Doug said, ‘I see something in you. There’s so much more that you’re not being given to portray.'”

Barbara became someone her family and friends barely recognized as she befriended ruthless Lucinda Walsh (Elizabeth Hubbard), threw business associate Jerry Halper (Harry Spillman) to the curb, and bedded married man Tonio Reyes (Peter Boynton). Next, Barbara sandblasted Brian and Shannon’s marriage by bringing her legal husband Duncan McKechnie (Michael Swan) to Oakdale just in time to interrupt the ceremony.

John Dixon (Larry Bryggman) appropriately dubbed the antagonist “Simply Barracuda.” The handle fit. “It was a hard transition,” Zenk says. “It took a while [but] once I figured it out, I completely embraced it.”

ATWT lost its captain when Marland died suddenly in March 1993. By then, he had brought Barbara through one of her more challenging periods and given her the love of a good man, Hal Munson (Benjamin Hendrickson), along with additional conflicts. “Douglas died the day after [my daughter] Georgia was born at the same hospital,” Zenk shares. “He knew that she’d been born and had sent me a huge bouquet of flowers. The next day, he was gone.”

The actress believes that the late scribe, known for digging into characters’ pasts to tell today’s stories, would approve of her current Y&R tale as Jordan, the sister of the late Eve Howard (Margaret Mason). “It’s a continuum,” Zenk says. “It’s part of why I knew I had to do this.”

Zenk feels connected to Y&R for a few reasons. The show’s late creator, Bill Bell, had worked with Irna Phillips, ATWT’s creator, for years when the two wrote ATWT, starting in the late 1950s until the mid-1960s. “I watched Lee Phillip Bell [Y&R co-creator and talk show host] growing up on TV [in Chicago],” Zenk adds. “The fact that I’ve gone from Oakdale, Illinois to Genoa City [Wisconsin] is amazing because my hometown was a half-hour from the Wisconsin border. It’s a natural fit that I’m here. That part seems organic. It feels right.”

Check out some of Zenk’s memorable moments as a Barbara Ryan from the Simply Barbara era on ATWT by clicking here.