In the late-’70s, Tina Andrews made headlines with Richard Guthrie as David Banning in creating what Jet magazine called at the time “TV’s Controversial Interracial Couple.” Or, as we’d call the pairing now, “Oh, What a Lovely Couple.” It was progress, but there was and still is more to be made. Just ask…
The 2020 nuptials of Valerie and David’s son Eli and his sweetheart — in real life, Lamon Archey and Sal Stowers, you surely know — marked the first time in the soap’s then-54-year history that an African-American couple had tied the knot on screen.
Emmy winners Debbi Morgan and Darnell Williams graduated the high-school sweethearts that they played off and on for decades into one of the most recognized and beloved supercouples in soap opera history. Not even that baby could upstage these two!
Though they didn’t achieve quite the same popularity as All My Children’s Jesse and Angie, Todd Davis and Bianca Ferguson’s young lovers enjoyed a long run in Port Charles — and got Sammy Davis Jr., no less, as Bryan’s father.
In a singularly wild 1984 storyline, Phil Morris’ character first played dead, then painted on enough makeup to play a white guy so as to infiltrate the Mob that wanted both him and his brother dead, no playing. Ex-girlfriend Amy Lewis (Stephanie E. Williams) was in on the charade, but you can tell from her expression, she was, “Seriously, Tyrone?”
“This town needs me!” declared Another World vet Jackée Harry’s new character upon landing in Salem in 2021. How right she was! Whether raising eyebrows or dropping truth bombs — or both at once — Paulina has been a breath of fresh air… with just a little hint of expensive perfume thrown in for good measure.
Much more than TV’s sexiest wedding officiant, Lawrence Saint-Victor’s Forrester Creations exec is the rare good guy who just wants to settle down… usually with a woman who already has a guy that she’s either kinda married to or sorta with. It’s like that.
A lightning rod of a character, Ellen Holly’s alter ego shocked viewers when she started dating a Black man, then shocked them again when it was revealed that she, too, was Black. Eventually, she settled down with the beloved Llanview PD detective who was played by daytime’s first Black Outstanding Lead Actor Emmy winner, Al Freeman Jr.
Since 1981, James Reynolds’ top cop has provided the (rarely heeded) voice of reason in Salem as well as a counterpoint to the madness that’s forever swirling around him. Don’t get sucked in, Abe! Don’t!
We all thought that Renee Jones’ good doctor was the Rx for a nice, simple, happy life for our beloved Abe — until we along with she discovered that for decades, she should’ve been sending Father’s Day cards to Stefano DiMera, aka the biggest Big Bad soapdom’s ever known.
Even as Tamara Tunie was starting to rack up her bazillion Law & Order: SVU episodes, she was turning in one winning performance after another as Oakdale attorney Jessica Griffin, who it bears mentioning was the bride in one of soapdom’s first interracial weddings. (Duncan McKechnie was her groom, as if you didn’t know.)
Genoa City was just the start for Shemar Moore. After making all of daytime fall for him as the photographer with whom everyone wanted to get, ahem, close-up, the Emmy winner went on to amass a body of work that’s almost as impressive as… well, his body.
Donnell Turner and (first Vinessa Antoine, then) Briana Nicole Henry walked a long and bumpy road to get the Port Charles movers and shakers together… only to have their relationship hit the rocks, hard.
Before Hamilton made a household name of Renée Elise Goldsberry, the future Tony winner struck one match after another as the Llanview lawyer whose case we never wanted to be closed. (BTW, that’s her with David Fumero as Cristian Vega. But you knew that. Of course you did.)
An overnight sensation when he first appeared on the soap in 1994, Keith Hamilton Cobb set not only the heart of Sydney Penny’s Julia Santos aflutter but viewers everywhere. Even now, just the thought of the presence that he generated still does the trick!
On any given day, Karla Mosley’s mercurial model could be a put-upon heroine or a plot-hatching vixen. But what she’ll most vividly be remembered for is the ground she broke in 2015 when it was revealed that she was a transgender woman. How the show lost interest in and dispatched a character that complex, we’ll never understand.
By the time we met Nathan Purdee’s “The Cannon,” he’d already traded the football field for the courtroom. However, as that backward glance suggests, the MVP could still score.
As a clairvoyant, Tanya Boyd’s former character surely could have predicted that she was going to be included on this list. She wouldn’t even have had to pull out the crystal ball, for Pete’s sake.
The soap thought that when it killed off Mishael Morgan’s first character in 2020, that was that. But she proved to be so popular that a surprise twin sister had to be created in order to return the actress to the spotlight.
The oft-recast grandson of Edward Quartermaine — first played by Joseph C. Phillips in 1994 — was just never going to fit in with the relatives that he discovered late in life. Not because he was Black, mind you, because he had scruples. And the Q crew? Not so much.
As this photo so gloriously illustrates, Jonelle Allen’s troublemaking minx was all that — and she knew it, too. On top of (all) that, few and far between are the soap catfights that could hold a candle to the ones she had with…
Vivica A. Fox was the good girl to Allen’s bad on NBC’s gone-way-too-soon late-’80s soap. But she held her own in their on-screen dust-ups as surely as she later would in Kill Bill.
Since 2006, Sonya Eddy has been doling out tough love as the nurse whose heart is as big as the emergency room — and a whole lot warmer, too.
Victoria Rowell and the late Kristoff St. John didn’t just deliver to the soap another popular couple, they delivered that rarest of all dynamic duos — a bonafide supercouple. Even now, years after we last got to see them share the screen together, the Winterses’ legacy lives on in…
Emmy winners Bryton James and Christel Khalil, as Dru and Neil’s children, have kept up the family tradition in Genoa City, entangling their characters in messes so knotty, we couldn’t get out of ’em ourselves if we had an instruction manual.
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