FLASHBACK: Nancy Addison 1978

Nancy Addison Gets Round

By Earl Wilson
Sarasota Herald-Tribune
May 20, 1978

NEW YORK -- Nancy Addison ... Nancy Addison ... who's Nancy Addison?

The name keeps recurring and gets familiar. She's a determined little brunette of 28, 5-feet-3, 103 pounds, and she's seen Gone With the Wind 15 times and Wuthering Heights 12 times. Once while watching "GWTW" she felt something strange around her kneed. An old man was pinching her.

"I turned and yelled at him," Nancy says. "I wanted to pull him out to the manager's office. It was so subtle the way he did it, I hardly knew it was happening."

But it isn't her getting pinched (that can happen to any girl in New York) that got Nancy's name around. It's because she's "Jillian," the aggressive lady lawyer in the soap opera RYAN'S HOPE and is breaking into nighttime as a morphine addict in a CBS three-part mini-series, The Dain Curse, May 22-24.

"Introducing" Nancy Addison, the billing says.

Nancy, who's brown-haired, independent, a product of Maplewood and West Orange, N.J. snorts at that "Introducing."

"I've been acting nine years, she begs to state.

"It's been three years that I've been playing Jillian the lady lawyer with the child out of wedlock who's the son of a man running for the Senate.

"I have about 400 good letters I should answer but there's also bad mail they don't show you. It's hidden and I know where to find it. It says I'm aggressive, egotistical and snooty and don't deserve any man."

Now she's abubble with excitement about her future. Hollywood calls since she did The Dain Curse. As a drug user she thinks she's killing lots of people in the Dashiell Hammett story and gets involved with James Coburn playing a detective.

"Our relationship is never consummated," she says modestly. "He's too old for her. I think I'm carrying a curse and he tries to solve her mystery. He was very helpful to me."

Nancy's accustomed to violence in acting from soap experience. She was a schizo in THE GUIDING LIGHT before.

"We were struggling for a gun and it triggered into my belly and I was dead. I was glad to be on my way to other soap operas."

Nancy studied the morphine addicts at Manhattan's "Needle Park," she watched them "noddin' off."

"At Phoenix House I spoke with a 76-year-old morphine addict who was on this drug for 30 years without anyone knowing. As long as he got his one fix a day he behaved normally.

"Later while he was in the hospital going through the horrors of withdrawal he realized the painful truth about himself and decided that if during all those years his wife had ever found out, and tried to keep the drug out of his hands, he would have done anything, use any means, even violence, to get his fix."

Her day is work, work, work. "I usually get up at 5, take my two dogs for a walk of half an hour, and then walk from my house down to 53rd Street and 10th Avenue. I'm carrying my parcels and I look like the bag lady on the Bowery."

Nancy meditates, she's learned karate, she's got her eyes on the future. It doesn't give her much time to see Gone With the Wind.

"Once I went three times in a row with watch Vivien Leigh. I just love that picture. I just love Vivien Leigh."