In a roundabout way, GH fans have Deidre Hall (Marlena, DAYS) to thank for Jane Elliot’s openness to taking on a soap role.
The pair had become friends while working on the Saturday morning kiddie show ELECTRA WOMAN AND DYNA GIRL — Hall as Electra Woman, Elliot as the villainess, Princess Cleopatra — and after Hall began working on DAYS, Elliot recalls, “I would go over to her house and I would see scripts on her bed and I’d go, ‘What is this?’ And she’d say, ‘Oh, those are my scripts for the coming week.’ And she had a life! She had a structure, she knew when she was going to work, she had scripts to learn, she had shows to do, she had a part to play. And I was hand-to-mouthing it, paycheck to paycheck, job to job. Was I going to make my rent this year or was I not? And she had this stable life.”
Shortly thereafter, she continues, “I get a call from my agent one day and he said, ‘Oh, I got a call from DAYS OF OUR LIVES, they wanted you to play a judge, I turned it down.’ And I went, ‘Noooooo!’ He said, ‘I thought you didn’t want to do a soap! You want to do a soap?’ I said, ‘No, no, I do want to do a soap! I definitely want to do a soap. I’m sick of never having enough work to be able to hone my craft. I want more hours in front of the camera, I want more flight time so I get to get good at what I do!’ So he said, ‘Okay, I’ll get back to you.’ ”
And he did — at what seemed like a most inopportune time. “I’d been working as a nursery school teacher and I was actually in La Cañada Flintridge, moving the teacher I was working with from one home to another, so I was in overalls, filthy from head to toe,” Elliot says. “And he called me and said, ‘You’ve got an audition for GENERAL HOSPITAL. Tonight.’ ” The audition her agent, a friend of then-Executive Producer Gloria Monty’s, had secured for her was for Gina Dante, a role Anna Stuart (who went on to play ANOTHER WORLD’s Donna et al) was vacating, but all the contenders were “raven-haired beauties with gorgeous brown eyes and that was not who I was at all.”
She suspects this, and the last-minute nature of the whole affair, ultimately worked to her advantage. “I hadn’t seen the script; they just handed the script to me right then and there and I had no prep time at all,” Elliot explains. “There’s something very freeing about a cold reading or an audition like that because it truly is the best you can do. You have no choice! It’s not like you’ve been studying it and you can try this and try that and get it better. It’s like, this is all there is! This is as good as it’s gonna get.” Within the next day, Monty called her agent. “She said, ‘We’re not hiring her for Gina, but we’re writing a role for her.’ And they wrote Tracy Quartermaine based on that audition.”
Elliot sees Tracy’s distinctive, sharp-tongued personality as the result of her collaboration with Monty and then-Head Writer Douglas Marland, but notes that her character choices were also inspired by her mother. “I think that actors draw on their lives, right? So, I’m looking around, and I’m looking for something to layer this character with and [I realize], ‘Oh, my God, my mother — that’s who it is, it’s my mother with the martini glass!’ My mother drank martinis and she smoked Chesterfield cigarettes in a Dunhill cigarette holder. Is that not a Quartermaine? That is so Quartermaine!”
The actress attributes the instant and enduring success of the chemistry among the key Q players — Stuart Damon (ex-Alan), Anna Lee (ex-Lila), David Lewis (ex-Edward) and Leslie Charleson (Monica) — to the brilliance of Monty (“Gloria had a wonderful eye for talent”) and Marland (“Doug was a consummate storyteller”), but also to the long hours the cast spent together during Monty’s tenure. “In the early days, so much of the work was done for you by being in the building from morning till night,” she says. “There was a camaraderie and a closeness that we can’t duplicate the way the show is shot now. [The] way we shoot the show now is, you come in and do your scenes and you leave, so people are not in the building the way we used to be in the building all day together…. We don’t have the hours off camera to get to know each other, so there’s actually more acting involved” in bringing the family’s dynamic to life.
Elliot’s own strong sense of self was key to her easy embrace of Tracy’s acidity; in essence, she didn’t care if the audience liked Tracy. “A lot of people are uncomfortable playing villains because they don’t want to be confused with the character they’re playing,” she observes. “I was never afraid of that. I know that’s not me.”
Despite having played Tracy on and off for nearly 45 years, Elliot says she still feels nervous before reporting back to work after having been away. “The night before I go back, I don’t sleep because I’m so anxious that I’ve forgotten how to do it, I won’t be able to do it, and I’ll just be the new kid on the block again,” she admits. “And then, of course, I get onto set and I’m working with Wally [Kurth, Ned] or I’m working with Lisa LoCicero [Olivia] or I’m working with Nancy Grahn [Alexis] or I’m working with Lynn Herring [Lucy] and all of that disappears, and I’m home.”
That is not something she takes lightly. While she says that Tracy’s popularity “mystifies me,” she is also “unbelievably grateful” for it, and marvels at her good fortune to have, in GH’s current showrunner, Frank Valentini, a boss who is game to write her back in when she calls to see if he can throw enough shows her way to qualify for her union health insurance. “We can go back to my agent saying, ‘Really? You want to do a soap?’ ‘Yeah, I want to do a soap!’ And 45 years ago, soap acting was pooh-poohed. You know, you want to have a film career, you want to be on Broadway, you want to get your own series. No, ‘I want to do a soap.’ Because somewhere in me, from the tips of my toes to the top of my head, I knew this was the ticket, I knew that doing a soap was the ticket. So when you see me on TV, when you see me playing this part on this show, that’s what you see. You see somebody who has so fully realized my vision of where this was going to take me, and where it’s taken me is to comfort and ease. That’s where it’s taken me. I’ve raised two children as a single mother on acting money and continue to be able to help my children on acting money. And that is, in my profession, a big win. So, is it the character, is it the show, is it me? It’s a combination of all of them, but I think the overriding aura there might be around me is appreciation that this is who I get to be and how I get to live my life. To get to love what you do and then have people love what you do? I mean, how many people can say that?”
Follow The Leaders
Jane Elliot isn’t intimidated by much — but when her Tracy with first paired with Anthony Geary’s Luke, she admits to feeling a bit daunted by the prospect.
“We were already friends; we became friends when he first started on the show and we used to hang out,” she says of Geary. “He actually tested with me for GENERAL HOSPITAL; same thing happened to him that happened to me. He tested for the role of Mitch Williams [Tracy’s scoundrel husband, which went to Christopher Pennock] and Gloria [Monty] did the same thing — didn’t hire him for that, but wrote him a role, wrote Luke Spencer for him.”
Elliot had a front-row seat to the rise of Luke and Laura, and notes, “Their coupling, the combination of Genie [Francis, Laura] and Tony, was a tough act to follow! And I was nervous about that, you know? I was nervous about, ‘Oh, Luke and Laura, Luke and Laura — Luke and Tracy?’ It didn’t have the same ring that Luke and Laura did and there was a time when Luke and Laura were on the side of the buses, you know what I mean? It was as big as it comes! So I was apprehensive about what we would bring to the table.”
She thinks that ultimately, the dissimilarity between the two relationships is what sold it to viewers. “The character of Tracy is so unlike the character of Laura. She’s conniving and manipulative and her desire to one-up Luke, to stay ahead of him, to not be manipulated by him and then constantly getting manipulated by him and constantly getting disappointed by him, created a really nice dynamic, which was completely not the Luke and Laura story at all. Luke and Tracy was a much more adversarial relationship where you could see that they loved each other, but they also hated each other.”
As for working with Geary, it was nothing but a joy for Elliot. “It was delicious,” she smiles. “It was fabulous.”
Did You Know?
• Elliot was a member of the bridal party when Genie Francis (Laura) wed Jonathan Frakes in 1988.
• She auditioned for the role of Abby on KNOTS LANDING, which went to Donna Mills, later GH’s Madeline, and was slated to play B&B’s Stephanie before Co-Creator William J. Bell decided Susan Flannery was a better fit.
Just The Facts
Birthday: January 17
Hometown: New York, NY
Daytime History: Elliot’s first soap role was Linda on ABC’s short-lived A FLAME IN THE WIND in 1965. She previously played Tracy on GH from 1978-80, 1989-93, 1996, 2003-17, 2019, 2020-21, 2022; and on THE CITY from 1996-97. On GUIDING LIGHT, she was Carrie from 1981-82; on ALL MY CHILDREN, she was Cynthia from 1984-86; and on DAYS, she was Anjelica from 1987-89.
Trophy Life: Elliot was the first GH actress to win a Daytime Emmy; hers was in 1981 for Outstanding Supporting Actress.
Friends For Life: Playing the decades-long rivalry between Tracy and Leslie Charleson’s Monica has been “so fun” for the actress, in part, because their real-life bond stretches back to 1965, when Charleson would hang out backstage during Elliot’s Broadway run in The Impossible Years (Charleson was dating one of the actors in the cast).
To Be Continued: Only in recent years has Elliot come to understand the appeal of serialized drama. “I never watched soap operas ever in my life, but I got hooked on a show called REVENGE years ago and it was appointment TV to me. I watched it every week and I went, ‘Oh, my God, I finally understand!’ ”
Step By Step: Elliot goes for weekly walks with former co-star and close pal Ian Buchanan (ex-Duke).
