Eileen Fulton, the minister’s daughter who spent the better part of 50 years portraying Lisa Miller, one of the first “bad girls” of daytime television, on the CBS soap opera As the World Turns, has died. She was 91.
Fulton’s family announced that she died in Asheville, North Carolina, on July 14 after a period of declining health.
Four years into the run of As the World Turns, Fulton joined the No. 1 daytime drama in 1960 for what was originally supposed to be a three-month summer storyline. She exited the soap three times — once to headline her own primetime spinoff, 1965’s Our Private World — but continued on through the final episode broadcast Sept. 17, 2010.
Her Lisa had eight husbands, with Nicolas Coster portraying two of them. Three of her marriages ended in divorce, four ended in death, and one was annulled. When As the World Turns was done, her character’s full name was Lisa Miller Hughes Eldridge Shea Colman McColl Mitchell Grimaldi Chedwyn. She also had lots and lots of lovers.
“She’s a romantic, that’s why she falls in love so much,” Fulton said in a 2005 conversation for the Television Academy Foundation website The Interviews.
Inducted into the Soap Opera Hall of Fame in 1998 and given a lifetime achievement award from the Daytime Emmys in 2004, Fulton was one of the first soap actors to have her own publicist.
She also employed a bodyguard to protect her from angry viewers who disapproved of what Lisa was up to. “They had a great love/hate thing [with me], it was amazing,” she said.
And in the ’70s, Fulton famously had a clause inserted into her contract that guaranteed she would never have to play a grandmother. “At that time, grandmothers had no romance at all — and I wasn’t about to let that happen to me,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 2000. She eventually became OK with that.
The oldest of three kids, Margaret Elizabeth McLarty was born on Sept. 13, 1933, in Asheville, North Carolina. Her mother, Peggy, was a schoolteacher and her father, James, a Methodist preacher. She said she knew by the third grade that she was going to be an actress.
After graduating from Lee Edwards High School in Asheville and, in 1956, as a music and drama major from Greensboro College, she moved to New York and studied acting with Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse, where one of her classmates was Keir Dullea.
Fulton had played a hooker in Girl of the Night (1960), starring Anne Francis, when someone from As the World Turns called her manager looking to see if one of his clients, East of Eden actress Lois Smith, was available to play Lisa. Smith was not, so he suggested Fulton.
“I knew I was going to get that part. There were 250 other girls there [at the audition], but I just knew,” she said.
Lisa “was supposed to be the sweet girl next door. I said, ‘I’m tired of being the sweet girl next door.’ I can’t change the lines, but I can change my intention once we’re on the air. I just thought of little conniving things I could do to Bob.” That would be her first TV husband, played by Don Hastings.
During one stretch in the early ’60s, Fulton would work in the mornings on As the World Turns (when it aired lived), race to the Billy Rose Theater on Broadway to play Honey in matinee performances of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and then appear downtown at the Sullivan Street Playhouse in the evenings in The Fantasticks.
Fulton quit As the World Turns for the first time in 1963 to “do other things,” which included an off-Broadway turn opposite Hal Holbrook in Abe Lincoln in Illinois. As she had trouble finding other work, viewers did not take to her replacement, Pamela King, and so she returned.
She left again in 1965, this time to star in Our Private World, which aired Wednesday and Friday nights on CBS. Lisa had fled Oakdale after dumping Bob to move to Chicago, where she wed the wealthy John Eldridge. (Coster played Eldridge; decades later, he would portray Lisa’s seventh husband, Eduardo Grimaldi.)
Our Private World, however, was canceled in September after just four months on the air, and Fulton was back on As the World Turns in 1966.
In 1983, Fulton exited in a contract dispute, to be replaced by Betsy von Furstenberg. But when she heard the writers were thinking about killing off Lisa, she made another comeback. “I don’t think anybody would believe Lisa is dead unless I do it,” she said.
Fulton co-authored two autobiographies, 1970’s How My World Turns and 1995’s As My World Still Turns; several murder mysteries; and another book, 1999’s Soap Opera: A Novel. She also was a cabaret performer and had her own clothing line at J.C. Penney.
In real life, Fulton, unlike Lisa, was married (and divorced) only three times.
Survivors include her brother, Charles Furman McLarty; her niece, Katherine Morris, and their children, Everly Ann Morris and Easton Lane Morris; and her sister-in-law, Chris Page McLarty.
In a 2010 interview with NPR, the actress said she was well aware that many viewers despised her character. There was one in particular.
“I was standing in front of Lord & Taylor. I’d only been on the show a few weeks,” she said. “And this beautifully dressed woman in a Chanel suit — in the days before there were knockoffs — came up to me and said, ‘Aren’t you Lisa?’ And I said, ‘Yes, that’s the part I play.’ And she said, ‘Well, I hate you!’ And she hit me! And people looked at me like I was rotten and this woman was a heroine.
“But I thought, ‘You know what? I’ve reached them.’ Then a telegram came into the studio. It said, ‘If that bitch Lisa marries Bob I’ll never watch As the World Turns again.’ That is how the character was truly locked in.”