As the World Turns star Eileen Fulton dead at 91: Actress played iconic 'bad girl' for half a century
She won the hearts of fans as the scenery-chewing 'bad girl' Lisa Grimaldi, a role she originated in 1960 and played for the final time on the show's last episode in 2010.
Fulton has revealed that although Lisa was conceived as a 'sweet girl next door,' she felt the character was insufficiently interesting and so she delivered her lines in a 'conniving' fashion that prompted the writers to change course and make her sinister.
Over the decades her character grew from a young 'vixen' - whom Time magazine once branded a 'superb****' - into a gentler grande dame.
At one point during the show, Fulton famously had a 'granny clause' installed in her contract that would prevent Lisa from having grandchildren, for fear that she would be written off the show if her character were seen as old and irrelevant.
She died July 14 in her hometown of Ashville, North Carolina 'after a period of declining health,' according to an obituary from the local Groce Funeral Home.
Although she was born in Asheville in 1933, she had a peripatetic childhood as a result of her father's vocation as a Methodist minister.
She had the performing bug from the age of two, when she cut into one of her father's services by singing the old folk song Shortnin' Bread and braved the resultant spanking, she told the Washington Post.
Fulton majored in music at Greensboro College and her father got her a job in a church choir, but she was determined to move to New York City, harboring dreams 'of being the greatest actress on Broadway.'
After studying under the seminal acting teachers Sanford Meisner and Lee Strasberg, as well as modern dance pioneer Martha Graham, she embarked on a showbiz career that finally took off in 1960 when she was cast on As the World Turns.
Over the next 50 years, she repeatedly left the show - 'I've quit forever three times,' she once drily remarked - but always wound up coming back.
In the early years of the show, Fulton worked tirelessly to juggle the soap and the New York stage, acting in such shows as The Fantasticks and as a replacement in the original Broadway production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.
But her most enduring role, the one that cemented her position in showbiz history, was as the stylish and ruthlessly conniving Lisa on As the World Turns.
She cycled through a dizzying succession of what eventually turned out to be eight husbands, remaining herself a consistently tantalizing presence on the show.
Fulton was the one who changed the character from the 'sweet girl' she was originally conceived as into the scenery-chewing villainess she became.
Since the show was filmed live, she felt she could not 'change her lines' but she could 'change my intentions once we were on the air,' she told the Television Academy.
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