Recently, I've had the pleasure of talking to some of the ALL MY CHILDREN actors and actresses who are returning for the show's 40th anniversary in January. One of them was Eva La Rue, who played Maria on AMC from 1993-'98 and 2002-'05 (and is currently playing Natalia on prime time's CSI: MIAMI). La Rue made it clear her heart is with AMC; after all these years, she said, 80 percent of the time she gets called out on the street, it's people wanting to tell her how much they loved her as Maria Santos.

But her heart is also evident in the charitable work she does for ovarian cancer. "I'm the spokesperson for the National Ovarian Cancer Coalition, and I've been doing that for a few years now," La Rue told me. "It's been awesome meeting women from all over the place. It's a disease that no one knows [enough] about, because breast cancer, cervical cancer and uterine cancer get a lot of press. There have been great awareness campaigns about them, so people know how to self-test for breast cancer, or to get a Pap smear for cervical cancer.

"There are no tests for ovarian cancer," La Rue pointed out. "You have to be on top of it, and be your own medical advocate. We all know when something's wrong; we just choose to be too busy and ignore it. But when it comes to things like that, you can't ignore it. If your doctor doesn't find it, and you still feel there's something [wrong], you've got to get a second opinion. It's probably one of the most misdiagnosed cancers, and, unfortunately, the survival rate is really low because it usually gets misdiagnosed." For more, visit www.ovarian.org.

And for the full, exclusive La Rue interview, in which she explains why she had to beg (!) to be included in AMC's 40th anniversary celebration, see Weekly's January 12 issue, on sale January 1.