Having It All
As seen in Soap Opera Weekly, 10/8/2002
Ten years ago, Hillary B. Smith was shopping for a new soap. She had left the role of AS THE WORLD TURNS’ Margo Hughes in 1990, burned out on the soap routine after seven years and eager to try different acting venues. But while her career thrived – she starred on- and off-Broadway, appeared in the movie Love Potion No. 9 with Sandra Bullock, and did lots of prime-time – her personal life suffered. Her kids, Phips and Courtney, at the time 4 and 6, missed their mom, who was spending most of her time on a plane between New York and Los Angeles. “My suitcase used to stay out, and they’d play in it,” she moans. “I had a commercial running at one point, and Phipsy ran up to the TV and said, ‘That’s my mommy! Give me my mommy back!'”
While the television set couldn’t fulfill Phips’ wish, his mom could. Smith put out the word that she was interested in doing another soap and ONE LIFE TO LIVE called about the role of Nora Hanen Gannon (later Buchanan), a high-powered, headstrong attorney.
In her dressing room with her daughter, Courtney, now 16, in tow, Smith recalls her audition. “I finished doing the scene, and they (executive producer Linda Gottlieb and some network executives) all sat there with their mouths hanging open. Not because I was so stellar but because I had taken a different approach. I had been doing Katharine Hepburn, and she (Gottlieb) had wanted Lauren Bacall, even though it said, “like Katharine Hepburn” at the top. I finished it, they said thank you, I left, called my agent, and said, “When’s that Crest commercial audition?’ I figured there was no way.”
She got the role, of course, but Gottlieb did have a couple of requests: She wanted Smith to become a redhead and show Nora’s soft side. (“Do what you want to do, just remember, sometimes you don’t know how hard you come across,” Smith recalls her saying.) Besides that, “she gave me carte blanche. The writers, Michael Malone and Josh Griffith…everything was rich. We had a wonderful directing team. It was a fabulous experience. I had been spoiled because I had come from Doug Marland (ATWT’s head writer). And Doug Marland was definitely a person who used the resources of the actors, so I had a lot of creative input. To come onto this show was a joy, and it was a magical time. I couldn’t believe my luck.”
Nora was introduced slowly – “I was working one day a week or every two weeks, which is a good way to bring in a character, especially one as strong as Nora” – giving Smith more time to spend with her children and her husband, Nip. It didn’t take long, however, until Nora became front-burner. “During the rape trial I had 40 to 60 pages of dialogue every night, and they extended the trial because it was so successful. So it went from being a two-week trial to a four-week trial to a six-week trial.” Smith won the Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress that year (1994); her reel included the closing argument episode and the Wait Until Dark episode (Todd stalking a blind Nora at the beach house).
Still, working a 7-9 job, as she puts it, was an improvement over her bicoastal days. “I wasn’t in L.A. I was home every night,” she stresses. “And at least I have my weekends with them (the family).” A particularly “hellish” time on the show, schedulewise, was during the regime of a certain executive producer who kept the midnight oil burning. “I ended up buying this couch because it’s a pullout,” she says. “I slept here in the dressing room, because we’d finish at 1, 2 o’clock in the morning and had to be back at 7:30. I didn’t even have the energy to go to a hotel. When Catherine (Hickland, Lindsay) came on the show, she said, ‘You are coming home with me.’ I wasn’t getting home at all to see the kids. I remember coming home one night at 11 o’clock, and this one (Courtney) was sitting up at the top of the stairs in tears going, ‘Why aren’t you here?'”
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