General Hospital's Nancy Lee Grahn Couldn't Resist Her Co-Star: 'I Was Falling Madly In Love'
Not all love stories are supposed to come to reality.
If you've ever wondered how actors manage to work long days, portray true love on screen, and then just go home without any feelings, well, sometimes they don't. Sometimes the story that is supposed to stay between two characters on screen spills over into real life and creates a messy situation.
Of course, this is especially true for the stories that are filled with romance, drama, and intimacy. Most of the time, soap operas have more than enough of all three, and Santa Barbara was no exception. In fact, the '80s soap set was the perfect trap and the perfect training ground for any young actress to make her first mistakes.
Nancy Lee Grahn, who portrayed Julia Wainwright Capwell on the show from 1985 to 1993, stepped right into it. On the screen, her character ended up with Mason Capwell, who was first portrayed by Lane Davies.
And if you ever thought the chemistry between the two was so good that it couldn't have been fake, it certainly wasn't. At least not from Grahn's side, who years later admitted her feelings to the world in an interview with Soap Opera Digest.
“I was falling madly – and I stress madly – in love with Lane. I walked right into the danger-zone trap of intensely working 18 hours a day for years with a brilliantly and vividly written love story and not being able to decipher fantasy from what was real. Had I known myself better at the time, I might have dodged pitfalls, but I didn’t and instead grew from them,” the actress confessed.
It was probably for the better that during Nancy Lee Grahn's Santa Barbara run as Julia, her partner Mason was recast twice. First, there was a change from Lane Davies to Terry Lester, and then another change to Gordon Thomson. Fortunately for viewers, both recasts managed to capture and preserve the essence of Julia and Mason's chemistry.
Today, you can enjoy the brilliance of Nancy Lee Grahn's performance as Alexis Davis on ABC's General Hospital. Tune in to the upcoming episodes Monday through Friday to never miss a single storyline.
Source: Soap Opera Digest via Soap.com