When a soap opera gets canceled, many actors scramble to find their next role, while some immediately get picked up by another soap.
And then there are others who decide to take a break from the medium altogether
Marcia McCabe took the latter route.
After having played heroine Sunny Adamson on Search for Tomorrow for close to nine years, the acclaimed and popular actress said she was "frankly exhausted" and needed a little down time before rejoining the ranks of employed soap actors.
"It was very healthy for me to take some time off," McCabe said, noting that she was at the age where she wanted to just enjoy life and not get up at the crack of dawn each day to go to the studio.
It also helped her deal with the loss of both her parents in a house fire prior to joining Search.
"I had lost both of my parents and hadn't really had a chance to mourn for them," she said, explaining that the rigors of her full-time role on Search provided her with an escape and once she wasn't working she had time to properly mourn and reflect on the tragedy and their loss.
After recharging her batteries, McCabe was cast with much fanfare in the newly created role of Alicia Grande on the top-rated ABC sudser One Life to Live, a role she played for about nine months before the character was, unfortunately, a victim of plot twist and was killed off in order for the show to pursue a complicated baby switch storyline.
"It was a great part," said McCabe in reference to Alicia "and I really wanted to work."
She does regret that then OLTL executive producer Paul Rauch never told her that the character was doomed from the start and not slated to last past her initial contract. Still, she does not regret taking the role and enjoyed the show. She does think in retrospect she might not have done all the publicity for the part had she known she wouldn't be a long-term fixture on the show.
As for doing an hour-long soap as opposed to the 30-minute Search, she said there wasn't a big difference because OLTL filmed by set rather than by the actual script.
"I didn't notice much of a difference because by the time I got to One Life, they had changed how the filmed it and so much was about where you were in the lineup," she said, noting that her apartment was in close proximity to the studio so she could even go home for lunch.
It also helped that her character didn't have a lot of interactions with the broad OLTL canvas and, rather, with only a select set of characters.
"It was very easy. I had very compartmentalized scenes," she noted.
In between her One Life and All My Children stints, McCabe actually had auditioned for another role on AMC, that ultimately went to actress Phyllis Lyons. Interesting to me and I pointed out to her during the course of our conversation that the role Lyons played was Arlene Vaughn, the alcoholic mother of Kelly Ripa's character, Hayley. So, at a relatively young age, which is common in soap casting, she could have played the future superstar's mother.
"I guess they just couldn't envision Sunny Adamson as an alcoholic," McCabe joked of her Search for Tomorrow alter ego.
Still, she enjoyed her time in the fictional town of Llanview and after a few years in between was cast as attorney Leslie Duprey on All My Children, a role she loved playing even though she knew going in that the character would be temporary and not a mainstay in Pine Valley.
"The hardest part of that role was learning the dialogue," she said of the legal terms that was required of her character as she was defending multiple-Emmy winning actor David Canary's character of Adam Chandler in a child custody suit.
Of working with the daytime legend Canary, McCabe had only wonderful things to say.
"David Canary was the consummate professional,"she said. "Very quite and studious and focused on his work. A pleasure to be on the set with."
Following AMC, McCabe went back to her Proctor and Gamble - which owned Search - roots and created the role of Bunny Eberhardt on the long-running NBC drama, Another World.
While at AW, her character was pretty much of an island and shared the majority of her scenes with leading man Tom Eplin, who she enjoyed working with and was a fun actor who kept performers fresh because he had an impromptu style that challenged people to keep up with him and do their best work. And the role was different enough from her previous characters that it provided an interesting challenge for the veteran actress.
She had little interaction with the rest of the storylines, though for Bay City loyalists, it's worth mentioning that McCabe noted how lovely lead heroine Victoria Wyndham, who played Rachel, was in her meetings with her before and after joining AW.
After a nearly 15-year hiatus from the genre, during which time she was raising her two children, Yvonne and Nick, McCabe, accepted a one-day role as Carolyn Wheatley on As the World Turns.
Even though it was a single-day shoot, the character was pivotal to the plot and fans were ecstatic to see the daytime legend back on their screen.
In between her start on Search and her work on ATWT, much had changed in the genre, though, which is reflective on how the industry had changed.
"The big difference between soaps from when I started on Search was that Search had cue cards. We were all theater trained and didn't want them," she said noting that the show eventually got rid of them. "I think it would have been different when it was still live."
She noted that obviously dropping ratings, which she directly attributes to the OJ Simpson Trial in 1994-95 when soaps were routinely pre-empted, as the beginning of the big change in the genre that necessitated lower budgets and therefore, less money the actors would make, For veterans who remained on their shows from that time forward until even today, they have had to all basically sign contracts for less money if they wanted to stay in the genre.
And, of course, the lower ratings and high costs of producing soaps eventually led to the mass exodus of all but four of the soaps from today's daytime landscape.
Having a soap career that spanned more than three decades, McCabe has worked with many daytime icons and became close friends with several of therm.
When asked which daytime star she would have loved to have had an opportunity to work with, but, unfortunately, never had the chance to, her answer was quick and simple.
"I never worked with (former Edge of Night, Guiding Light and All My Children star) Larkin Malloy, one of my dearest friends and I adored him as a person. That would have been a real treat."
In the final moments of our phone interview, McCabe showed just how much so many of her co stars meant to her.
When prompted to play a one-word association game with those she worked most closely with on Search, her fond memories were so extensive that she couldn't just limit it to a single phrase.
Here's her comments on some of the stars she worked with.
MARY STUART (Jo, Search) Icon, teacher, mother, friend, mentor.
LARRY HAINES (Stu, Search) Funny, unassuming, glue to the show, friend.
SHERRY MATHIS (Liza, Search) Regal, loving, hard worker, elegant, beautiful.
DAVID FORSYTH (Hogan, Search, John, AW...etc....) Brother, friend, funny, hard working, deep, loving. A joy to work with.
MARCUS SMYTHE (Dane, Search, Peter, AW) Funny, funny, funny! Like a big kid, a big puppy dog.
DOUGLAS STEVENSON (Lee, Search) Sweet, boyish, great friend.
ROD ARRANTS (Travis, Search) Handsome, sweet, kind, very supportive.
As for the actress she was closest to during her run on Search, Louan Gideon, who assumed the role of Liza in 1985, she had even more to say.
"She was such a special person," McCabe said, adding that even after Search ended, their friendship stayed "deep and abiding."
"She had a heart of gold, she was quirky, funny, adorable," McCabe said, adding that when Louan passed away in 2014 after a long bout with breast cancer, her funeral in Asheville, North Carolina, which Marcia attended, was a "five hour love fest. So many people loved her."
And more than four decades after her debut on Search, the same could be said of McCabe, especially from the legion of fans who remained devoted to her long after her soap days, we all love her.
Note: In addition to the Search for Tomorrow Memories Facebook page mentioned in Part One of my feature, there is also an Another World Memories Facebook Page, also run by my friend, Chad Dancer. Look for both groups in the search engine on the social media site.
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