NY TIMES: Liz Welch On Her Mother, Ann Williams

Liz Welch wrote a fascinating op-ed piece in today's New York Times about her soap actress mother, Ann Williams, who died of cancer 24 years ago today leaving three orphans behind. Here's an excert about Williams' early career:

My mother financed porn films and married a cult leader. She was also a doctor. And a hopeless alcoholic. She was a soap opera actress. In the early ’60s, my mother was cast as Erica Brandt on YOUNG DR. MALONE, one of the first televised soap operas to be produced by Procter & Gamble.

She rose to fame as the original Dr. Maggie Fielding on THE DOCTORS in 1964, leaving the show to give birth to Amanda in 1965. When she conceived me in 1968, her pregnancy was written into her role as Eunice Wyatt on SEARCH FOR TOMORROW, another Procter & Gamble production. She played Eunice for 10 years until Morgan Fairchild, in one of her first TV roles, as Jennifer Pace, shot Eunice in the back during a schizophrenic fit. Jennifer held the gun, hearing voices; Eunice whimpered, trying to reason with her psychotic murderess. Though I was only 7 when Eunice was killed, I remember receiving a big box from Procter & Gamble every Christmas, filled with soaps and hair products.

Mom’s next role lasted from 1978 to 1980, on yet another Procter & Gamble-sponsored soap, THE EDGE OF NIGHT. Margo Huntington was the most successful businesswoman in all of Monticello. She owned the local TV station, wore fur coats and painted her long fingernails a bloody red. Margo was my favorite, nothing like Mom, who made me cringe with embarrassment whenever she wore her earth-toned velour tracksuits and clogs to the grocery store. Margo’s shady business deals led her into financing pornography; her unrequited love for a married man led her into a marriage-cum-business arrangement with Eliot Dorn, a former cult leader, in the hopes it would make her true love jealous. That backfired — Margo instead was bludgeoned with a fire poker by one of Eliot’s love interests, who also happened to be her maid. Cut to a commercial.

Welch also weighs in on why she thinks soaps have lost their magic.

That was the magic of soap operas in their heyday. They exorcised people’s feelings about whatever ills plagued them in their own lives. Today, though, people don’t need soaps for that. And we certainly don’t need actors to play these sometimes scary and often sensationalized roles. Real people get to play those, in news stories that are horrendous, stupendous and almost impossible to believe. Talk shows, reality shows, cable news do for us what radio serials and soap operas once did: They make us feel better about our own dramas.

Liz Welch is the co-author with her sister Diana Welch of a memoir, "The Kids Are All Right."

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- "The Kids Are All Right": The Story of Ann Williams' Children