Kassie DePaiva On The GH End of OLTL’s Todd and Blair: ‘The Most Heartbreaking Thing I’ve Ever Done’
One of the most iconic supercouples to come out of One Life to Live was the pairing of Blair Cramer and Todd Manning, which kicked off in 1994 when the two town pariahs found common ground and formed a friendship that, over the course of time and many soapy twists and turns, blossomed into a romance. Kassie DePaiva, who began playing Blair in 1993, opened up about the characters’ storied relationship — and how it came crashing down on General Hospital — in a new interview with Remind Magazine.
Breaking Up Is Hard To Do
DePaiva admitted that when the soap first paired her with Roger Howarth, it seemed to her like their alter egos were an odd match. “I still shake my head how that worked,” she told Remind, “but there was something really magical between Todd and Blair that was like, ‘Okay, I don’t really get this, but fans like it.’ I was just picking up scripts and keeping the story going, but if you go back and watch some Todd and Blair stuff on YouTube, it’s really well written, and it’s complicated, so it’s not just fluffy stuff. These people were really trying to figure out their relationship, their dark, broken pasts, and now I get it.”
OLTL went off the air in January 2012, and in the show’s final episode, Blair and Todd reunited at last — only to have their happiness cut short by Todd’s arrest for the murder of his twin brother, Victor Lord, Jr. Following the show’s cancellation, a handful of OLTL characters were brought over to sister soap GH. Howarth and Kristen Alderson, who played Todd and Blair’s daughter Starr, were among the Llanview vets signed to a contract, while DePaiva was brought on for a few episodes in March, with another stint in July. During Blair’s summertime visit to Port Charles, Todd proposed to her — and Blair not only shot him down but revealed that she was engaged to another man, leaving him gutted…. and Carly to help pick up the pieces of his shattered heart.
“I was just a lucky, lucky girl to walk into that part, and I feel like I made it my own,” DePaiva shared of the Blair character, a role she took over from Mia Korf in 1993. “And it was something that I protected. So, when One Life to Live ended and they took me to General Hospital for those three or four days to break Todd and Blair up so Todd could be with Carly [Laura Wright], it was the most heartbreaking thing I’ve ever done. That’s how emotionally attached I was to it, because I felt I’d worked 20 years to build this brand, and you’re gonna give me three days to be pissed off at Todd, and that’s gonna be it? That would never happen. Not in a million years. So that was hard.”
In 2013, Howarth was forced to retire from playing Todd on GH when a lawsuit broke out between ABC and Prospect Park, which had bought the creative rights to the show and rebooted OLTL as an online series that summer. Before returning to GH with a new character to play (Franco Baldwin), Howarth and DePaiva reteamed as Todd and Blair on the Internet revival, which saw the duo reunite and remarry before Todd was forced to leave Llanview to protect his family from a mysterious criminal organization.
Sadly for Todd and Blair fans, that happy ending of sorts was undone when DePaiva reprised the role of Blair once again in 2023 for a few more episodes. By that point, Howarth was on his third GH role, portraying Dr. Austin Gatlin-Holt after Franco was killed off in 2021, and the actors didn’t share scenes. “I was assuming I was going to be working with Roger, but then I realized, ‘Okay, well, Roger’s not Todd Manning anymore, so I guess that’s not a viable storyline,’ ” she noted to Soap Opera Digest at the time.
During the actress’s 2023 appearance, it was revealed that Blair was the long-talked-about ex-wife of Martin Gray, suggesting that her 2013 union to Todd had come to an end. DePaiva frowned to Digest, “I hope our little One Life to Live fan base isn’t upset by that. But I think, knowing Todd and Blair, something happened — she probably thinks he’s dead and he’s not or something. I don’t think Blair would ever give up on him.”
Despite not working together that go-round, DePaiva and Howarth did reunite off camera, which she detailed to Digest. “He didn’t even know I was coming [to work on GH],” she reported. “I was finishing up my scenes with Jane [Elliot, Tracy], and Roger came in to dry-block his scenes, all sweaty because he’d been working out, and he looked at me like, ‘What?!’ And he grabbed his heart and I grabbed my heart. After I finished taping, he came over and we took pictures and it was really nice to catch up with him a little bit.”
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