Actress Eileen Fulton Isn’t Vixen To Slow Down
Eileen Fulton, in her 38th year as the much-married Lisa on CBS’ “As the World Turns,” could wear out the Energizer Bunny. No contest.
An ageless beauty, the doyenne of daytime is on deadline with her publisher, St. Martin’s Press, for her seventh novel, her first romance, titled - wait for it - “Soap Opera.”
Then there’s her line of costume jewelry that she cheerfully flogs on Home Shopping Network.
On Sunday, she closes her three-weekend cabaret gig (“I do a lot of Sondheim,” she confides. “The lyrics are poetry.”) in the Oak Room at New York’s Algonquin Hotel.
“I love cabaret. It gives me a chance to play several different characters in one evening,” she said. “Still, it’s best to be Eileen Fulton, with her three husbands, instead of Lisa Miller with her seven.”
After 37 years as Lisa, Fulton has made friends with her character. “Lisa’s a nice person,” she said. ” A little dippy, but nice. Years ago I don’t think I would have enjoyed having her in my house.”
Fulton concedes that she has slowed her pace since the early ‘60s, when she was establishing Lisa as soap opera’s “vulnerable vixen,” five days a week, live, and doing some stage work on the side.
“Friday nights I did ‘The Fantasticks’ at the Sullivan Theater, then a Saturday matinee of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’, then an early show and a late show at the Sullivan, then a Sunday matinee and Sunday evening, and Monday morning they made sure I was back at 7:30 on the dot,” she said.
“Back then, we were a half-hour, three- or four-people show, and we did many, many scenes. There was a lot of dialogue, much more than we have today, and it was all live - which was scary,” she said.
“As the World Turns” finally went to video tape in the mid-‘70s. “We taped an hour show live-to-videotape and we did not go back into it unless a camera fell over. If an actor made a mistake, you’d just be there on tape, looking stupid in front of 23 million people.”
And, yes, she still enjoys her day job and has no immediate plans to quit the 52-week “ATWT” production grind “as long as I have something fun to do and I’m not bored.”
Her toughest day in recent memory came last year, with the payoff of her 18-month story line. Her day began at 7 a.m. and ran until 3:30 the following morning, and she was acting all the way through.
“The floors are concrete. The air conditioning is very cold. And finally, in the last scene, I had to cry and cry and cry. At that point, I thought it would be easy to cry - but it wasn’t!
“Still,” she added, “it was a great show.”