As the World Turns star Eileen Fulton has died at age 91, reports suggested.
According to Deadline, Fulton (real name Margaret Elizabeth McLarty) passed away in her hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, due to an undisclosed illness. An obituary mentioned that the actress had experienced “a period of declining health,” though offered no further specifics.
Fulton, who was married three times throughout her life, initially joined As the World Turns in 1960 as Lisa Grimaldi, in what was originally supposed to be a short-term role for actress Lois Smith. When Smith was unavailable, Fulton was cast instead and ended up staying on the CBS daytime soap for more than 1,800 episodes over 50 years.
“I knew I was going to get that part,” Fulton told the Television Academy years later. “There were two or three other girls there [at the audition], but I just knew. Even when I walked into the room with all these girls .. I just knew [I’d get the part].”
Lisa Grimaldi was considered the first soap vixen and thus was a trailblazer for future soap icons like Susan Lucci, Katherine Kelly Lang, Brenda Dickson and Kelly Monaco. Lisa’s messy romantic entanglement with Bob Hughes (Don Hastings) in the 1960s is also seen as one of the first examples of a soap “super couple.”
By the mid ‘60s, Fulton was such an in-demand actress that she starred in Broadway’s original production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and the off-Broadway musical The Fantasticks at the same time as she was filming As the World Turns. The actress would shoot the day’s live episode of ATWT, then rush to her Broadway theatre for a matinee performance of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and be back on stage in The Fantasticks each night. (She had earlier studied with pioneering acting teachers Sanford Meisner and Lee Strasberg.)
Fulton joked to The Los Angeles Times in 2000 that her seductive As the World Turns character must have had “thousands of lovers” — as well as eight husbands — throughout her tenure on the soap.
“[Lisa] really couldn’t control herself,” she quipped.
At that time, Fulton admitted that there was truth to longstanding gossip that she could be a diva onscreen and off.
“I want things done right, but I’ve learned that there’s a nice way to ask,” she teased. “I was awful when I first went on the show, and mainly that was insecurity and being scared to death. Our show was live — and that was so hard. I remember just not knowing how to ask somebody to be quiet . . . just saying, ‘Shut the hell up!’ They called me ‘garbage-mouth.’”
Fulton ultimately established her place in TV history, having been inducted into the Soap Opera Hall of Fame in 1998 and earning a Daytime Emmy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004.
“I hate to sound ungracious, but I felt it was about time [I won an Emmy],” she later told The Television Academy. “I wanted [that Emmy] ten years ago, I really, really did. I’m very happy to have it. I’m delighted and I’m very proud of [it]. … I have [the Emmy] standing right here in my entranceway. I could have said, ‘Oh, I’ll just put in the closet.’ Hell no! I’m going to put it right out here where everyone can see it and lust after it.”
Fulton remained as a cast member on As the World Turns until its cancellation in 2010. Aside from her daytime work, Fulton had a minor role in the 1960 drama Girl of the Night and also appeared in the short-lived prime time spinoff of As the World Turns, Our Private World.
Following As the World Turns’ cancellation, Fulton retired to Black Mountain, North Carolina in 2019. The soap legend is survived by her brother, Charles Furman McLarty, and sister-in-law, Chris Page McLarty, as well as niece Katherine Morris and their children.
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