Where Are They Now? Soap Opera Stars

A NOTE ON THIS BOOK.

Everything you are about to hear is built from the public record. Interviews these people gave, episodes that went out to tens of millions of living rooms, announcements they made themselves, obituaries written by people who loved them. Nothing here is invented. Where a life turned hard, we tell you the truth of it, but we do not linger over the wreckage, and we do not pretend to know a person's heart better than they knew it themselves.

These were actors who took the least respected job in American entertainment and did it at a pace no other actor in the country is asked to survive. Twenty five to forty pages of dialogue a day. One take. Fifty weeks a year. Some of them did it for forty years in the same chair, wearing the same character's face, aging on camera in front of the same audience, and the industry that handed them that schedule spent most of a century treating the whole enterprise as a punchline. This book takes the opposite position, which is that it was the hardest job in show business and that the people who did it well were among the most skilled working actors of their generation.

A word about the shape of the thing. Soap opera is now old enough that a retrospective like this one has to hold two kinds of story at once. There are the people still doing the job this very afternoon, some of them fifty years into the same part, which makes the question of where they are now an unusually easy one to answer. And there are the people we have lost, and there are a great many more of those than the writers of this book expected when they started counting. The last eighteen months in particular took names that this genre had assumed would simply always be there. We will hold all of it in the same hand, the wins and the hard roads, the empires and the quiet exits and the funerals, because that is what it means to ask the question this whole series is built on. Not who they were when the organ music swelled and the screen cut to a commercial. What happened after. Where are they now.

INTRODUCTION. THE PEOPLE WHO CAME OVER EVERY AFTERNOON.

Here is a thing that is true and that almost nobody says out loud. For roughly seventy years, the most consistently watched storytelling in American life was not on at night, and it was not in theaters, and it did not win the awards anyone brags about. It was on in the afternoon, five days a week, fifty weeks a year, in kitchens and break rooms and hospital waiting areas and living rooms with the curtains half drawn against the glare.

And it was on in your house. That is the part that separates this genre from every other kind of fame we have covered in this series. A movie star visits you. You buy a ticket, you sit in the dark with strangers, you go home. A soap opera moved in. It arrived at the same hour every weekday, through decades of your actual life, and it kept arriving whether you were fifteen or fifty, whether the year was good or the year was the worst one you ever had. People planned around it. People taped it. A generation of American mothers learned to fold laundry standing up, facing the correct direction. And the effect of that repetition, over ten years or thirty or fifty, is something no other form of television has ever quite matched, which is that the audience stopped experiencing these actors as performers and started experiencing them as neighbors.

Consider what that actually does to a person on the receiving end. Susan Lucci could not walk through an airport in 1985 without someone telling her, with genuine heat, what they thought of a decision Erica Kane had made on Tuesday. Eileen Fulton, playing daytime's original bad girl in the early nineteen sixties, was reportedly approached by strangers who could not entirely separate the woman from the part and did not particularly want to. This is not the ordinary distortion of celebrity. This is something stranger. It is the audience refusing, in the nicest possible way, to admit that the person is fictional.

Now consider what the job asked of the people doing it. There is no rehearsal to speak of. The scripts arrive in an avalanche. An actor on a daytime drama may be handed more dialogue in a single week than a film actor speaks in an entire feature, and they are expected to land it emotionally, accurately, on the first take, because there is no time for a second one, and then come back tomorrow and do it again. Film actors who have tried it use words like terrifying. That is why so many of the biggest names in American movies have a soap credit buried in their first paragraph. It was the boot camp. Demi Moore, Julianne Moore, Meg Ryan, Kevin Bacon, Tommy Lee Jones, Alec Baldwin, Marisa Tomei, Laurence Fishburne at age eleven, Morgan Freeman in the middle of an already serious career. The industry harvested that training for sixty years while politely pretending the training was embarrassing.

And then the genre began to shrink. In 1970 there were roughly nineteen daytime soap operas on American television. By the turn of the century there were ten. Today there are five, and one of those is on a streaming service, and one of those is brand new. The shows that went away did not simply end. Guiding Light had been running for seventy two years, first on radio and then on television, more than fifteen thousand episodes, the longest-running drama in broadcast history, and one Friday in September of 2009 it stopped, and a fictional town that had outlived the Second World War, the moon landing, and the entire history of the television set itself, ceased to exist. Two hundred people lost their jobs. Millions of people lost a standing appointment.

So where did all of them go. That is what the next few hours are for. You are going to meet the ones who never left, who are on television at this very moment, some of them fifty years into the same role. You are going to meet the ones who walked away on purpose, to Broadway and to Italy and to Australia and to a life at close range. You are going to meet the ones who used the afternoon as a launching pad and became the biggest names in the business. You are going to meet a great many people we have lost, including two of the largest losses this genre has ever taken, both of them within the last year. And at the end you are going to meet the five shows still standing, and the surprising fact that one of them is younger than your phone.

More than sixty names are coming. Some of them you have not thought about since you were young enough to be home in the afternoon. All of them came into your house. Somewhere a stage manager is calling places, the organ is coming up under the last line, and a very familiar face is about to turn toward the camera. Let us go back.

THE ONES WHO NEVER LEFT.

There is a peculiar arithmetic in daytime television, and it is worth doing the math before we go any further. In prime time, a drama that survives three seasons is called a hit. In film, an actor who books steady work five years running is called dependable. In soap opera, three years is a perfectly respectable run, the kind of credit you keep near the top of the resume, the kind of job that pays off a car and maybe a down payment. And then there are the people we are about to meet, who have played the same human being for thirty years, forty years, fifty years and counting. Same lot. Same parking space. Same living room set with the same lamp on the same end table. Again this morning. Again tomorrow.

Think about what that actually asks of a person. Most acting is a visit. You arrive, you build someone out of spare parts and instinct, you live inside them for a few months, and then you hand back the wardrobe and go find another one. This is not that. This is a marriage to a fictional person, conducted in public, at the pace of an actual life. These actors got older on camera. They lost parents on camera. Their real hair went gray and their real knees got creaky and their real griefs walked onto the set with them and, more often than you would think, got written into the script, because the show is a living thing and it eats whatever is in the room. The audience did not watch a performance. The audience watched a life happen, five days a week, in half hour and hour increments, for decades.

We would argue this is the single most underrated feat of endurance in American acting, and nobody hands out a trophy for it. There is no Oscar for showing up.

Here is the other thing, and it is the reason this whole episode has an unusual shape. Everyone in this section is on television right now. Today. This afternoon, in most American time zones, on a network or a streaming app, doing the job. So when we ask where are they now, the answer is not a beach in Florida or a vineyard in Oregon or a quiet second act selling real estate. The answer is at work. In the same chair.

DEIDRE HALL.

Every soap needs a center of gravity, and for half a century the town of Salem has had one. Dr. Marlena Evans arrived on Days of Our Lives on June 21, 1976, a psychiatrist with a therapist's stillness and a voice that could talk a person down off a ledge, and she has been the show's steady heartbeat ever since. Deidre Hall built her out of poise. That was the trick, and it was a good one. Whatever chaos the writers unloaded on Salem, and they have unloaded a great deal, Marlena stood in the middle of it and listened. You could believe she was the smartest person in the room without her ever announcing it. That is harder to play than screaming, and it lasts longer.

In May of 2026 the production stopped and threw her a party on the set, because on May 15 they marked fifty years of Deidre Hall playing Marlena Evans. Fifty years. A person born the week Marlena first walked into Salem is now old enough to have grandchildren. Whole networks have launched and folded in that window. Entire genres of television have been invented, exhausted and revived. And through all of it, one woman kept getting up, kept driving in, kept finding new corners of a character she has known longer than most people know their spouses. There is no craft lesson in that, exactly. There is only the fact of it, which is more impressive than any lesson.

Her story right now is a hard one, and it is hard for a reason the audience knows. Her longtime co-star Drake Hogestyn, who played John Black, died, and rather than quietly recast or write around it, the show wrote the loss into the fiction. John Black is gone in Salem too. So the consuming arc of Marlena Evans at this moment is grief, real grief, dressed in the clothes of a character, played by a woman who is actually mourning the man she worked beside for decades. Some viewers find that unbearable. Most find it the truest thing on the air.

Where is she now. She is seventy eight years old and on the Days of Our Lives call sheet, playing Marlena in her fifty first year, carrying the show's mourning for her friend on screen five days a week.

SUSAN SEAFORTH HAYES.

If you want the record, here it is. Susan Seaforth Hayes has been playing Julie Williams on Days of Our Lives since 1968. That is fifty seven years, the longest active tenure any actor holds in American daytime, and it began in a country that had not yet put a man on the moon. Julie started out as trouble, the kind of young woman who made her own weather, and she matured into the closest thing Salem has to an institutional memory. When Julie remembers something on that show, she is usually remembering something the audience watched happen, which gives her lines a weight no writer can manufacture.

The love story is the part people know. She married her co-star Bill Hayes, who played Doug Williams, and they were married for forty nine years, which is roughly forty six years longer than Hollywood generally allows. Doug and Julie were the couple daytime fell in love with in the seventies, and the reason it worked is that nobody was acting very hard. The two of them were the genuine article, on screen and off, and viewers can smell the difference from a mile away. Bill died in January of 2024 at the age of ninety eight. Then, in July of that year, Susan did something almost no performer is ever asked to do. She stood on a soundstage at Doug's funeral, in character, and delivered the eulogy for a man she had actually just buried. We do not know what that costs. We know she did it.

She turned eighty three on July 11, 2026. Her story this year is Julie rebuilding a life after Doug, which is to say the show handed her the truth and let her play it. Julie runs a book club in Horton Town Square now, and there is something quietly perfect about that, an older woman insisting on company and conversation and a reason to leave the house. In June of 2026, on what would have been Bill's one hundred and first birthday, Susan posted a public tribute to him. She has never been shy about loving him out loud.

Where is she now. She is at work in Salem, holding the record for the longest active tenure any actor has in American daytime, playing a widow rebuilding, which is exactly what she is.

ERIC BRAEDEN.

There are maybe two or three characters in the entire history of this genre whose names function as shorthand for the whole thing, and Victor Newman is one of them. Eric Braeden has played him on The Young and the Restless for forty six years, and what he did with the part is strange and brilliant. Victor should be unbearable. He is a self made tycoon with a granite jaw, a taste for domination, and a habit of announcing his own name like a weather warning. Braeden, who was born in Germany and arrived in American television with an accent that casting directors once treated as a liability, turned all of it into an asset. The formality became menace. The stiffness became authority. He made a man you would never want as a father into a man millions of people would follow anywhere.

Age has not softened the performance and it has not softened him. In 2023 he went public with a cancer diagnosis, told the audience the truth about it, and beat it, and he did that in front of people rather than behind a publicist. In 2026 he lost roughly two weeks of taping to pneumonia, which at eighty five is not a small thing, and then he came back and picked up where he left off. There is a version of this business where a man in his eighties with that resume takes the graceful exit and the lifetime achievement plaque. He appears to find that version boring.

Instead, on June 9, 2026, he headlined a crossover with Beyond the Gates, the genre's newest show, which is a lovely bit of symmetry. The oldest active titan in daytime walking into the newest series is the genre passing something forward, and doing it in the only currency soaps have, which is a face the audience already trusts. The new show got instant legitimacy. He got a fresh room to be terrifying in. Everyone came out ahead.

Where is he now. He is eighty five, back at work on The Young and the Restless after the pneumonia, still playing Victor Newman, still the last word in any room the writers put him in.

MELODY THOMAS SCOTT.

Nikki Newman has been the other half of that empire for forty seven years, and hers is the more difficult acting job, though it took the audience a while to notice. Victor gets to be immovable. Nikki has to be everything else. Melody Thomas Scott has played her as a woman who came up from nothing, married the most demanding man in Genoa City, and then spent decades negotiating the terms of her own life against his, over and over, with the settlement never quite holding. The character has been rich and ruined, sober and not, adored and dismissed. Scott gave her a spine that bends without snapping, which is a specific and underrated skill, and she did it for longer than most marriages last.

She turned seventy on April 18, 2026, and the year gave her something the industry almost never gives daytime actors. She was named to the Hollywood Walk of Fame Class of 2026. That matters more than a star on a sidewalk normally would, because daytime has always been the part of the business that gets patted on the head. Millions of viewers, thousands of hours, decades of craft, and the town treats it as a stepping stone or a punchline. Handing a soap actress a Walk of Fame star is the town admitting, a little late, that showing up for forty seven years is not a lesser kind of career. It is arguably the harder one.

Her story on the air this year is a hard turn inward. Nikki is dealing with a mass on her optic nerve and the loss of her vision, which strips away the two things a soap heroine usually leans on, which are her looks and her ability to see what everyone in the room is doing. What is left is voice, stillness, and fear, and Scott has been playing all three without a shred of self pity. It is the kind of material that could go sentimental in a hurry. She has refused to let it.

Where is she now. She is on The Young and the Restless in her forty eighth year as Nikki Newman, playing a woman losing her sight, with a Walk of Fame star coming to her name.

PETER BERGMAN.

Peter Bergman has one of the more interesting entrance stories in the genre, because he was already a known quantity when he showed up. He had spent years on All My Children as Dr. Cliff Warner, a role that made him a household face, and then in November of 1989 he walked into Genoa City and took over Jack Abbott, a part another actor had originated. That is a coin flip in daytime. Audiences are territorial, and they will reject a new face for a decade out of pure spite. They accepted Bergman almost immediately, and the reason is that he found the thing that makes Jack work, which is charm operating as armor. Jack Abbott is funny because being funny keeps people from looking too closely at how much he is carrying.

The awards record tells you what his peers made of it. Twenty five Lead Actor nominations at the Daytime Emmys, which is the most anyone has ever received, and three wins, in 1991, 1992 and 2002. Twenty five nominations is a number that stops being about any one performance. It means that for a quarter century, whenever the industry sat down to decide who was doing the best work in the format, somebody wrote his name down. That is not luck and it is not a lobbying operation. That is consistency at a level that eventually becomes its own genre.

He has never coasted on it, either. His 2026 story ran him through a kidnapping and a stabbing, which is the kind of plot a lesser actor treats as a paycheck week and a chance to lie down. Bergman plays the fear underneath it, because he understands something about the format that took the rest of television another thirty years to learn. The plot is only a delivery system. What the audience actually remembers is the face of a man who has been badly frightened and is trying not to show it to his family.

Where is he now. He is on The Young and the Restless, in his thirty seventh year as Jack Abbott, still doing the work that got him more Emmy nominations than any lead actor in the format's history.

MICHELLE STAFFORD.

Phyllis Summers arrived on The Young and the Restless in 1994 as a problem, and Michelle Stafford has spent three decades refusing to let anyone solve her. That is the whole achievement in a sentence. The easy path with a character like Phyllis is redemption, the slow sanding down of the sharp edges until she is safe enough to root for. Stafford never allowed it. Her Phyllis is furious, funny, self justifying, brilliant at the wrong moments and catastrophic at the right ones, and she has the rare quality of being unpredictable inside a format built on predictability. You watch her scenes not knowing which way she is going to jump. Neither, you suspect, does Phyllis.

The career has a detour in the middle worth noting. Stafford played the role from 1994 to 2013, then went to General Hospital and played Nina from 2014 to 2019, then came back to Genoa City in 2019 and has been there ever since. Building a second character on a rival show and making that one stick too is not a small thing. Most performers have one great part in them. She built a second one on a different network, in a different city, with a different rhythm, and then walked back into the first one as though she had never been gone.

Her 2026 was pure Phyllis. She took control of Newman Enterprises through an artificial intelligence scheme, which is the sort of plot that could easily curdle into nonsense, and then, having proven she could take the empire, she handed it back to Victor. That last beat is the character in miniature. Phyllis never wanted the company. Phyllis wanted everyone in that building to know she could take it. In July of 2026 the industry gave her a fourteenth Daytime Emmy nomination for Lead Actress, which suggests they are still enjoying her as much as we are.

Where is she now. She is on The Young and the Restless playing Phyllis Summers, fresh off her fourteenth Emmy nomination, and still nobody in Genoa City knows what she is going to do next.

JOSHUA MORROW.

Here is a statistic that should be impossible. Joshua Morrow first appeared as Nicholas Newman on The Young and the Restless on June 21, 1994, and he has played that part for thirty two years without ever being recast. Not once. In a genre where a character can go through four faces in a decade and the audience is expected to simply absorb it, Nick Newman has had exactly one. Morrow was a kid when he took the job. He is fifty two now. Everything that happened to him as an adult happened while he was on that call sheet.

What he made of the part is the quiet accomplishment. Nick is the Newman son, which sounds like a gift and is actually a trap, because a character defined by his relationship to a titan can very easily become furniture. Morrow gave him decency without dullness, a temper that he keeps on a short leash, and a permanent low grade exhaustion with being that man's child. He has spent three decades playing someone trying to be a better man than his father while working in his father's building. That is not a story that ever finishes. It is a story you can play for thirty two years, which is precisely what he has done.

Off camera he has been notably, almost stubbornly ordinary about it. He has been married to his wife Tobe since 2001, they have four children, and he has been going to the same job the whole time, which in this business qualifies as an eccentric lifestyle choice. His 2026 story went somewhere considerably darker than his life has, with Nick falling into a fentanyl addiction and surviving a near fatal overdose. It is heavy material handled without sensationalism, and Morrow has played the shame of it more than the spectacle, which is the correct instinct and not the common one.

Where is he now. He is at Y and R in his thirty second year as Nicholas Newman, the only actor who has ever played the part, deep in the hardest storyline the writers have handed him.

SHARON CASE.

Sharon Case came to Genoa City in 1994, roughly the same season as several people on this list, and she got handed the most thankless job in soap opera, which is the good girl. Sharon Newman started as sweetness, and sweetness has a shelf life of about four years before an audience starts throwing things. What happened instead is that Case turned out to have real range underneath the sunniness, and the show discovered it could break this character in ways it could not break the others. Grief, mental illness, guilt, addiction to her own bad decisions. Sharon has carried the show's heaviest emotional freight for three decades, and Case never plays for sympathy, which is why she gets it.

She had done her apprenticeship before Genoa City, with earlier work on General Hospital and As the World Turns, so she arrived knowing the rhythm of the format, which is a skill unto itself and one you cannot fake. Daytime is shot fast. There is no month of rehearsal, no luxury of discovering the character over a long production schedule. You get one take, sometimes two, the pages may have changed that morning, and the actor who can find the emotional truth of a scene at that speed is worth three actors who need a week to get there. She won a Daytime Emmy in 1999 and has been nominated for Lead Actress since, including in 2023 and 2025, which means her best work is not filed under nostalgia. The industry is still handing her nominations in the present tense.

In 2026 she was named Performer of the Week, an honor that goes to whoever wrecked the audience most thoroughly in a given stretch of episodes. Thirty one years into the same role and she is still capable of a week that makes people stop scrolling on their phones and look up at the screen. That is not tenure. That is form.

Where is she now. She is on The Young and the Restless as Sharon Newman, still the show's most reliable heartbreak, and still collecting recognition for work she is doing this year rather than work she did in the nineties.

KATHERINE KELLY LANG.

There is a very short list of actors who have appeared in the first episode of a show and are still on it, and Katherine Kelly Lang is on that list. Brooke Logan walked onto The Bold and the Beautiful in the debut episode in 1987 and has been the center of that show's gravitational field ever since. Brooke is the reason the Logans and the Forresters have spent forty years unable to leave one another alone. She has married into that family repeatedly, in configurations that require a diagram, and Lang has played the whole ridiculous, magnificent saga entirely straight, which is the only way it works. The moment the actor winks at the material, the spell breaks. She has never winked.

She is sixty five now and appears to have decided that being an institution does not require being a monument. The signature blonde hair, worn long for thirty eight years and effectively part of the show's visual identity, got cut. Shorter, darker, and it turned up on screen without apology. That sounds like a small thing and it is not. In a genre that treats a leading woman's look as a contractual asset, choosing to change it after thirty eight years is a statement about who owns the face. She does.

She has also been shooting a film in Italy, playing a producer, which is a nice bit of life imitating art. Lang has kept a working relationship with Italy for years, and the audience over there treats B and B with a devotion Americans normally reserve for football, which is one of the quiet facts about this genre that surprises people. These shows travel. A daytime lead in Los Angeles can walk through a piazza and get stopped by three generations of the same family. Meanwhile the day job continues. Brooke is still in the middle of everything, still causing weather in the Forrester household, still going to work in the same building where she started when Reagan was in office.

Where is she now. She is on The Bold and the Beautiful as Brooke Logan, in her fortieth year, with new hair and a film shooting in Italy.

JOHN MCCOOK.

John McCook has been playing Eric Forrester since The Bold and the Beautiful began in 1987, and before that he was Lance Prentiss on The Young and the Restless back in the seventies, which means his daytime career is old enough to draw a pension in most countries. Eric is the patriarch of the Forrester fashion dynasty, and McCook plays him with a gentleness that is unusual in that job description. The soap patriarch is usually a bully in a good suit. Eric is a craftsman, a father who likes his children, a man whose authority comes from having made beautiful things with his hands. It is a quieter register, and McCook has sustained it for four decades without ever making it soft.

Then the show handed him a story that most series would never touch. Across 2025 and 2026, Eric was pushed toward retirement, thrown a retirement party he had not asked for and did not want, and treated as a man whose time had politely expired. And instead of accepting it, he defected to a rival company. This is ageism as a plot engine, played by an actor in his eighties who has publicly said he has no plans to leave. You do not often see a show and a performer make an argument together this directly. The character says he is not finished. The man playing him says the same thing to reporters. The two statements reinforce each other until the fiction stops feeling like fiction.

That is the thing about daytime that outsiders miss. When an actor has been in a role this long, the boundary between the person and the part gets porous, and a good writing staff knows how to use that. The audience watching Eric fight for his relevance knows exactly whose relevance is actually on the table, and it lands twice as hard.

Where is he now. He is on The Bold and the Beautiful as Eric Forrester, still a series regular, still saying plainly that he has no intention of retiring.