A Real Page-Turner
It just wasn’t All My Children without a family album of one kind or another to welcome us to Pine Valley. We only wish that its pages were still being filled today. (Are you listening, ABC?)
All My Children: Rare Photos and Bittersweet Memories From the Soap’s Storied 1970-2011 Run on ABC
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Image Credit: ABC/Courtesy of the Everett Collection -
Tea and Villainy
Image Credit: ABC/Courtesy of the Everett Collection In the 1970s, dance instructor Nick Davis (Larry Keith) tried to waltz his way into the overstuffed purse of filthy-rich society dame Phoebe Tyler (Ruth Warrick). He stood a pretty good chance of it, too — she liked a good compliment as much as she did a bad boy.
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A Star Is Born
Image Credit: ABC/Courtesy of the Everett Collection Although Susan Lucci is said to have auditioned for good girl Tara Martin, she definitely wound up with the better role: that of indomitable glamorpuss Erica Kane, which the eventual Emmy winner played for the entirety of the soap’s 1970-2011 network run.
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Daddy Dearest
Image Credit: ABC/Courtesy of the Everett Collection Machiavellian Palmer Cortlandt (James Mitchell) so disapproved of the relationship between daughter Nina (Taylor Miller) and upstanding doctor Cliff Warner (Peter Bergman) that he let her believe she was going blind in hopes of getting her to stop, ahem, seeing him.
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Nice Try, Pops!
Image Credit: ABC/Courtesy of the Everett Collection Obviously, Palmer’s plot to separate Cliff and Nina failed miserably. Almost as miserably as the show’s attempt to recast Nina in the mid-1980s and move Cliff on to other love interests. (Shortly after his portrayer was let go — which might have been the best thing that ever happened to him — The Young and the Restless hired him as a recast for conniving Jack Abbott.)
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Youth Is Wasted On the Young
Image Credit: ABC/Courtesy of the Everett Collection Everything you need to know about this love triangle, you can tell from this one photo: Dr. Charles Tyler (Hugh Franklin) wanted to be with Erica’s long-suffering mother, Mona (Frances Heflin), but wife Phoebe refused to let him go.
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Family Matters
Image Credit: ABC/Courtesy of the Everett Collection When you think of the greatest TV parents ever, you think of Ozzie and Harriet, Mike and Carol Brady, Cliff and Clair Huxtable — and Ruth (Mary Fickett) and Dr. Joe Martin (Ray MacDonnell).
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So Close and Yet So Far
Image Credit: ABC/Courtesy of the Everett Collection Erica’s half brother, Mark Dalton (Mark LaMura), and Ellen Shepherd (Kathleen Noone) overcame their age difference to embark on what should have been a blissfully happy marriage. Spoiler alert: It was not (and, worse, it pointed her toward an even more disastrous union with Ross Chandler).
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Strike a Pose
Image Credit: ABC/Courtesy of the Everett Collection As Erica’s modeling career took off in the 1980s, she gave a leg up to Jenny Gardner (Kim Delaney), who at some point was going to have to get used to taking pictures without preppy boyfriend Greg Nelson (Laurence Lau) in them.
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Two Bad
Image Credit: ABC/Courtesy of the Everett Collection Jenny’s brother, “Tad the Cad” Martin (Michael E. Knight), genuinely cared for troublemaker Liza Colby (Marcy Walker). But when she learned that he’d also been carrying on with her mother, she would neither forgive nor forget — not until years later, when she became “the other woman” during one of his 204 marriages to Dixie Cooney.
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Father’s Day
Image Credit: Donna Svennevik/ABC/Courtesy of the Everett Collection Mainly from 1983-84 (but off and on until 2011), All My Children fan Carol Burnett recurred as Verla Grubbs, the secret daughter of Phoebe’s third husband, Langley Wallingford (Louis Edmonds), a reformed con artist that boutique owner Myrtle Fargate (Eileen Herlie) knew from her days on the carnival circuit.
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In a Family Way
Image Credit: ABC/Courtesy of the Everett Collection Sweethearts since they were teenagers, Frankie’s parents — the former Angie Baxter (Debbi Morgan) and Jesse Hubbard (Darnell Williams) — became so popular that when he was killed off, Loving paired his widow with look-alike Jacob Foster. Of course, in 2007, All My Children decided that Jesse hadn’t died at all, rehired Williams and reunited the supercouple.
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Party Animals
Image Credit: Virginia Sherwood/ABC/Courtesy of the Everett Collection You could always count on ambitious Erica to affix herself to the arm of the richest, most powerful man at any soiree. Clearly, the winner at this highfalutin hootenanny was sharp-dressed Palmer.
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Nothing to See Here
Image Credit: Donna Svennevik/ABC/Courtesy of the Everett Collection It’s just sleazy schemer Adam Chandler (David Canary) keeping an especially close eye on Dixie (Cady McClain), the doe-eyed innocent he’d knocked up and would eventually institutionalize in hopes of gaining control of their son, JR.
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Who’s This Bozo?
Image Credit: Cathy Blaivas/ABC/Courtesy of the Everett Collection Why, that’s the long-lost Eric Kane (Albert Stratton), whom daughter Erica found working in the circus in 1989 — and whom she soon wished she hadn’t bothered to find. He turned out to be every bit the lowlife her mother had always said he was.
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Opposites Attract
Image Credit: Cathy Blaivas/ABC/Courtesy of the Everett Collection Rough-around-the-edges Trevor Dillon (James Kiberd) wasn’t at all the kind of man that money-hungry Natalie Marlowe (Kate Collins) thought that she wanted. But he was most definitely the kind of man that she needed. If only he hadn’t also caught the eye of her sister, loco “Janet From Another Planet” Green.
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His Brother Was a Keeper
Image Credit: ABC/Courtesy of the Everett Collection Politician Travis Montgomery (Larkin Malloy) was married to Erica when he allowed back into his life estranged brother Jackson (Walt Willey)… who turned out to be — sorry, Mike Roy — the love of her life.
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The Perfect Couple… Until They Weren’t!
Image Credit: Bill Morris/ABC/Courtesy of the Everett Collection The stuff that dreams are made of filled the romance of Dr. Maria Santos and Edmund Grey — whose portrayers, Eva LaRue and the late John Callahan, were wed from 1996-2005. Too bad we always have to wake up from dreams. The couple’s marriage hit the skids after they were forced to give back their adopted son, and Maria had a one-night stand with her brother-in-law.
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The Next Generation
Image Credit: Robert Milazzo/ABC/Courtesy of the Everett Collection Erica’s marriage to Count Dimitri Marick put in one another’s orbit her illegitimate daughter, vindictive Kendall Hart (Sarah Michelle Gellar), and his illegitimate son, Anton Lang (Rudolf Martin). Fun fact: The actors reunited years later on Gellar’s series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, when Martin made a guest appearance as Dracula. Yes, the Dracula!
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Doubles, Anyone?
Image Credit: ABC/Courtesy of the Everett Collection Whoa. A lot to unpack in this photo, in which vixenish Skye Chandler (Robin Christopher), who’d eventually take up residence in the Port Charles of General Hospital fame, was on a date with good-guy artist Jeremy Hunter (Jean LeClerc), who after crossing over to Loving died when a serial killer turned him into a statue. Oddly, Trevor looks more perturbed to see them than his “doll,” Natalie, who spent years obsessed with her former stepson, Jeremy. See? Told ya it was a lot!
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Mirror, Mirror
Image Credit: ABC/Courtesy of the Everett Collection Anytime Erica got within dissing distance of longtime nemesis Brooke English (Julia Barr), shade was sure to be thrown. Over the decades, they fought over the men of Pine Valley the way we do the last French fry on the plate.
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Making a Splash
Image Credit: ABC/Courtesy of the Everett Collection Don’t let this picture fool you: Julia Santos (Sydney Penny) and Noah Keefer (Keith Hamilton Cobb) weren’t always this happy. In fact, they only even met when she ran away to Center City after being scarred by a chandelier that fell during a tornado.
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Life Imitates Art
Image Credit: ABC/Courtesy of the Everett Collection All My Children got it right and then some when it cast Mark Consuelos and Kelly Ripa as poor boy/rich girl love interests Matéo Santos and Hayley Vaughan in the mid-1990s. They fell in love for real, tied the knot in 1996 and now rank among Hollywood’s prettiest power couples.
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A ‘Meet-Cute’ It Wasn’t!
Image Credit: Ann Limongello/ABC/Courtesy of the Everett Collection After a car accident with Dr. David Hayward (Vincent Irizarry) left Erica’s famous face scarred — for life, she feared — she wound up overcoming her hunger for revenge to fall for the conniver.
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Double Trouble
Image Credit: Steve Fenn/ABC/Courtesy of the Everett Collection Although Greenlee Smythe (Rebecca Budig) and Leo du Pres (Josh Duhamel) were both naughtier than nice, they brought out the best in one another — to the point that viewers were crushed when he died protecting his sweetheart from his homicidal mother, Vanessa.
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They’d Only Just Begun…
Image Credit: Ann Limongello/ABC/Courtesy of the Everett Collection One of the most tragic couples of the late 1990s, Ryan Lavery (Cameron Mathison) and Gillian Andrassy (Esta TerBlanche) had scarcely said “I do” when the Grim Reaper replied, “You think so, do you?” Adding insult to injury, Gillian was killed by a hitman who thought he was taking aim at General Hospital heroine Anna Devane.
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BAM!
Image Credit: Howard Wise/JPI Only after killing off Elizabeth Hendrickson as Frankie Stone did All My Children realize that it had in the character’s pairing with Eden Riegel’s Bianca Montgomery the potential for daytime’s first same-sex supercouple. Quicker than you could say, “Oops!” Hendrickson was rehired as Frankie’s twin sister, Maggie. (Later, The Young and the Restless would try to capitalize on the actresses’ popularity, too, by casting them as Chloe Mitchell and Heather Stevens. Alas, since they weren’t paired up, the reunion fell flat.)
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Married… With Problems
Image Credit: Donna Svennevik/ABC/Courtesy of the Everett Collection Yeah, these expressions do a pretty good job of capturing the way that Babe Carey (Alexa Havins) and JR Chandler (Jacob Young) felt throughout most of their marriage: tense, concerned, ticked and slightly manipulative. If we recall correctly, their wedding vows even included a line about “… through good schemes and bad.”
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The Most Romantic Kind of Fusion
Image Credit: Heidi Gutmann/ABC/Courtesy of the Everett Collection Arguably, All My Children’s last great supercouple was Kendall (by then played by Alicia Minshew) and Zach Slater (Thorsten Kaye, now Ridge, The Bold and the Beautiful). Though initially, their marriage was a sham, they were really only fooling themselves: We could tell from the start that they were made for one another!
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Reunited, and It Feels So Good
Image Credit: ABC screenshot Although the Satin Slayer cut short Dixie’s life in 2007 — via a plate of poisoned pancakes, no less! — she was resurrected in time to reunite once more with true love Tad before the end of the serial’s run… or at least they end of its run for now. Hey, we can hope, can’t we?
