FLASHBACK: Martha Byrne Plays a Typical Teenager 1986

Martha Byrne Plays a Typical Teenager

By Connie Passalacquac
Gadsden Times
January 26, 1986

There's an overwhelming difference between Lily Walsh of AS THE WORLD TURNS, played by Martha Byrne, 16, and other teenage-girl soap characters, who are frequently overly cute or perky or habitually scantily clad. Lily is a for-real teen.

Perpetually fighting with her mother, the cloying nervous villainess Lucinda Walsh (Elizabeth Hubbard), whining about school life or distracted by dreams of first love, Lily is the kind of kid you use to be - or whom who might now be raising.

A good part of Lily's naturalness is due to the acting of Miss Byrne, who still has a tad of her baby fat and whose personality is seemingly unaffected for a child actor.

"I got into show business entirely on chance," she recalls among frequent giggles and "you knows." "I liked to sing and my sister dared me to go on an audition for [the Broadway version of] 'Annie.' I stood in line with all the girls. And I got to play one of the orphans, July, for two years and be the understudy to the actress who played Annie."

Miss Byrne played the role while commuting to her suburban New Jersey home, which she shares with her father, a tree surgeon, her housewife mother and two older brothers and a sister. She's now a junior at a Catholic high school.

"The best part about 'Annie' - and show business, too - is that you really get to be close, and I mean really close, to the people you work with, like a family. AS THE WORLD TURNS is like that, too," she says. Backstage, her two best ATWT friends are two who would make your average teen swoon: 16-year-old Emmy winner Brian Bloom (who plays Dusty Donovan) and 20-year-old Jon Hensley (Holden Snyder).

On the show, Lily has just begun to enter into a love triangle with their two characters. So how does Miss Byrne feel about her character getting involved with these hunks? "Great," she says, followed by two full minutes of giggles.

Miss Byrne, however, takes her craft seriously. "All I want to do is work," she says. "Just before I got the soap, I almost decided to leave the business, because not too much was happening."