Veteran soap fans recall Loving, the ABC half-hour soap opera that debuted 40 years ago. The show’s cast included then-daytime newcomer Susan Walters as willful, spoiled Lorna Forbes, along with some heavy hitters and a future Oscar winner.
Susan Walters: Loving Lorna
Created by Agnes Nixon (All My Children; One Life to Live) and Douglas Marland (Guiding Light; As the World Turns), Loving was set in the fictional college town of Corinth, Pennsylvania. The soap opera premiered focusing on the wealthy Alden family, the working-class Donovan clan, TV journalist Merrill Vochek (Patricia Kalember, later to star in NBC’s Sisters), and their friends and foes. The series debuted on June 26, 1983, with a two-hour movie that aired in primetime.
“About a year before I got the part, I moved to New York to be a model with Elite,” Walters (Diane, Young and the Restless) shares with Soap Hub. “They had a strong commercial and TV division. I did a bunch of commercials. I screen-tested for a role on Texas and did an under-five role on One Life to Live as a girl in a gym. That was it.”
Landing Her Big Break
ABC hired director Michael Lindsay-Hoag (Brideshead Revisited) to helm the pilot for Loving. The revered director urged decisionmakers to cast the then-unknown Walters as Lorna. “I was really lucky,” the actress modestly shares. “There were a few young women who’d already been on soaps up for the part.” She believes bearing a physical resemblance to the late Perry Stephens (ex-Steve, Bold and the Beautiful), who was hired to play Lorna’s brother Jack, helped seal the deal. (Ironically, Jack was later revealed to have been adopted!)
It wasn’t until later that Walters discovered that Lindsay-Hoag had championed her casting. “He said, ‘She’s going to be good,'” the actress says. Lorna had a few love interests during Walters’s tenure on Loving, including future Oscar nominee and Emmy winner Bryan Cranston, who played college professor Douglas Donovan. “How can you be bad with him?” she rhetorically asks.
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Susan Walters: Page and Paper Dolls
Even though Loving was Walters’s first big role, she knew she was fortunate to work on the pilot with Lloyd Bridges (Johnny Forbes; Grant, Paper Dolls) and Geraldine Page (Amelia Whitley), who went on to win the Best Actress Oscar for her role in the 1985 film The Trip to Bountiful. “They both told me I’d be good and to keep studying,” Walters recollects.
An AMC viewer when she was in high school, Walters realized just how delicious the role of Lorna was. “I had fun with it from the very beginning,” she says, “This character was like a young Erica [Kane, Susan Lucci].” Perhaps Walters should have felt more nervous being cast as a series regular alongside veteran players like Wesley Addy (Cabot), Augusta Dabney (Isabelle), and Teri Keane (Rose), but she was too busy diving into the material and honing her craft.
Loving’s Legacy
“When you’re young, you’re just braver,” she muses. Lorna’s misdeeds included telling Stacey Donovan’s (Lauren Marie Taylor) boyfriend, Tony Perelli (Richard McWilliams), that she was pregnant with his child to ensure their future. After her relationship with Tony ended, Lorna took up with evil Jonathan Matalaine (John O’Hurley) — who turned out to be the devil!
“I had the devil attack me,” recalls Walters, noting that may have been done to partially redeem the willful Lorna. The actress later met her husband Linden Ashby (ex-Curtis; ex-Cameron, Y&R) on Loving, and the two celebrated their 37th wedding anniversary earlier this year. From her early days on the show, she remembers receiving support from not only co-stars but also from Nixon and Marland. “They were both so kind,” Walters fondly recalls.
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