Fond Farewell: Out of This "World"

In my teen years, I was a positively rabid fan of Dynasty. I had scrapbooks packed with every conceivable photo and clipping. When it was canceled in 1989, I somehow needed to transfer that sort of obsessive energy into something else and it happened to fall upon the longstanding daytime soap As the World Turns, which happened to be enjoying one of its most rewarding and captivating periods around that time. This was thanks to a brilliantly talented head writer named Douglas Marland. One of his creations was the dynamic force of nature Lucinda Walsh, essayed by a daytime veteran named Elizabeth Hubbard. Ms. Hubbard passed away on April 8th, 2023 at the age of 89 of (an undisclosed form of) cancer. And today we will take a look at her career, which went well beyond the scope of World and included working with and for some of acting's greatest lights.

This is Elizabeth's mother, Elizabeth Wright Hubbard, one of the first half-dozen women to emerge as a doctor from Columbia University and eventually to become a pioneering icon in the field of homeopathic medicine. She and her husband had two boys in addition to their daughter, who was born on December 22nd, 1933 in New York, New York. Young Elizabeth possessed unheard of drive to become an actress and did so as soon as possible.

Having graduated summa cum laude from Radcliffe, she proceeded to studies at The Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, becoming the first American ever to receive the school's silver medal. She's seen here in a production of Lock Up Your Daughters (on the left is a young Nancy Dussault.) Back home, she began working on Broadway as a replacement in shows such as Threepenny Opera and Compulsion as well as an understudy/standby for The Fighting Cock (with Rex Harrison) and Kwamina (for Sally Ann Howes.) 

Nothing's ever easy. She made her official Broadway debut in a show called The Affair, but it was short-lived. Next, she took roles on the daytime serials The Guiding Light and Edge of Night before finally landing in another play, The Passion of Josef D, opposite Luther Adler and a transformed Peter Falk as Stalin. But it was not well received and closed within days.

Next came The Physicists, with a prestigious cast. (Note her "prestige billing," coming at the very end with "and" and a larger font.) It was also short-lived, closing in just over a month.

A gal's gotta eat... So she took a role on a daytime show that had begun as an experiment in daily medical anthology, but within a year had been reconfigured as a continuing serial, The Doctors. As Dr. Althea Davis, she had her real life background as the child of a female doctor from which to draw inspiration and experience. By no means had she given up dreams of a career in the theatre, but this was a solid gig with steady income.

Though the series was intended to (and often did) revolve around James Pritchett as Chief of Staff at Hope Memorial Hospital, Hubbard quickly emerged as an audience favorite and a heroine to root for. Her stormy, on-again/off-again romance with fiery Gerald Gordon was a significant part of her story line on the show. 

Hubbard soon enough became a principal face of the show. Her character went through any number of medical, familial and romantic crises including one incident wherein she suffered a brain tumor.

It's common enough for soap stars to have their photos splashed across and inside fan rags that promote the shows and performers...

...but she proved popular enough to make the cover of regional newspaper program listings...

...and was featured more than once in TV Guide, which had tremendous circulation. These pics are from a fashion layout she posed for in one issue.

In those heady days, daytime performers could hold onto their jobs and simultaneously do shows on Broadway. This is exactly how it was when Hubbard did the musicalization of How Green Was My Valley (1941), A Time for Singing in 1966. Seen also are Shani Wallis, later of Oliver! (1968) and David O'Brien (a costar from The Doctors) in the dark suit. The show folded rather quickly, unfortunately.

Still appearing on the soap, Hubbard continued to pursue a Broadway hit. She found one when she was cast opposite no less than Albert Finney in A Day in the Death of Joe Egg. However, a strike led to the closing of the show after nearly six months. 1968 was the year she wed notable NYC furrier David Bennett.

Now Hubbard set out to conquer movies and television. She left The Doctors, a New York based show, and headed to Hollywood where she was featured on the hit western The Virginian (getting to kiss cute Doug McClure in the bargain) and Marcus Welby, M.D., in which she played a physician enduring sexual harassment from a patient (Don Stroud.)

Her greatest stab at the big time came with a featured part in the Gene Hackman film I Never Sang for My Father (1970) as his character's caring girlfriend, who flies to his side as he's facing difficult challenges in the wake of his mother's death. Seen here and elsewhere, there was a certain lilting glance, capped by her curtain of blonde hair, that lent romantic appeal to whomever she was working with.

The movie, based on a Broadway play, is often downbeat and even disturbing, but Hubbard arrives two-thirds of the way through it with a breath of fresh air and a lively, airy presence. Both Hackman and star Melvyn Douglas were Oscar-nominated. Still, it was soon back to The Doctors for more of Althea Davis' trials and tribulations. In 1971, she gave birth to a son, Jeremy. Her furrier husband designed a special mink coat (this was 1971, after all) which had a maternity segment that could later be zipped out after the child had arrived!

Here we see yet another stab at Broadway, Children! Children!, with Dennis Patrick (and an unseen Gwen Verdon), but this show closed after 13 previews and only one performance!

In 1973, The Doctors celebrated its tenth year as a soap. Hubbard and the series' lead Pritchett were depicted with stacks of the series' scripts. These two prevailed as the show's longest standing performers.

What made Hubbard such a compelling performer was an offhanded spontaneity; a feeling that the lines were coming from a 100% instantaneous thought. She possessed the ability to make every line seem immediate. In 1974, she was granted the very first Emmy for Best Actress in a Daytime Drama - For a Series. (Yes, trivia mavens, Mary Fickett of All My Children had been given an Emmy for her daytime work, but that was a prime-time Emmy! 1974 was the first year of Daytime awards as a separate entity.)   

Her marriage had collapsed by 1973, making her a single mom for much of the time. Having had what she describes as an unhappy childhood herself, she was determined to see that Jeremy had all the love and affection that she felt had been denied her as a youth.

Off-Broadway and regional theatre gigs continued, too, as seen here with Uncle Vanya.

With John Kane as her husband, President Woodrow Wilson, Hubbard portrayed Edith Wilson in a 1976 daytime drama special, First Ladies Diaries: Edith Wilson.

For her trouble, she picked up another Daytime Emmy, for Outstanding Actress in a Daytime Drama Special (though there was only one other nominee, Susan Browning, who'd portrayed Martha Washington in another installment of the same series.) Shortly after this, she left The Doctors and concentrated on a balance of motherhood and stage performing.

She made a brief, but lively, appearance in the 1979 film The Bell Jar, as one of the staff at a ladies magazine who welcomes and orients a raft of arriving interns.

Another trip on The Great White Way came when she had a costarring role in the stage musical I Remember Mama with Liv Ullmann.

The show was not a long-running hit, but she was in there swinging (and singing) as Aunt Trina.

Another brief movie role came with 1980's Ordinary People, in which she played half of a couple who are friends with Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore. (They're chiefly seen attending a play of questionable merit.)

This was less a "role" than a bit of atmospheric window dressing, demonstrating the type of social circle that the principle characters lived in. Still, it's not exactly bad to have on one's resume a speaking part in a Best Picture Oscar-winner...! She worked as a standby on Broadway for Irene Worth and Rosemary Murphy for the show John Gabriel Borkman that winter.

In 1981, she was lured back to The Doctors, her character Althea having lost her daughter (for much of the time portrayed by Newhart's Julia Duffy!)

Unfortunately, by 1982 The Doctors was canceled. (The show that replaced it - Just Men! - was also canceled after just 13 weeks.) Hubbard successfully headed back to Broadway alongside George C. Scott and some other familiar names in Present Laughter. This was followed by still one more flop, Dance a Little Closer, a musicalization of Idiot's Delight (1939), which closed on opening night after 25 previews... But something all new was just about to turn up.

In 1984, the writers of As the World Turns decided to develop a wealthy businesswoman character named Lucinda Walsh, who could stir up some trouble in Oakdale and add a bit of the glitz that was then in vogue on prime time shows like Dynasty, Dallas and Falcon Crest. Hubbard found herself with a new look and a new type of character who was far afield from the noble heroine she'd portrayed all those years on The Doctors.

Even better, less than a year after she was hired, the show got a new head writer in Douglas Marland, who'd worked with Hubbard in the 1970s on The Doctors. He knew from experience what could be mined from the skillful, dedicated and highly dynamic actress. So he began to write to her strengths, making Lucinda more flamboyant, meddlesome and outre. (All of this augmented further by Hubbard's tweaking of dialogue.) Her daughter Lily was recast with an actress named Martha Byrne and from there it was off to the races.

Lucinda was hyper-obsessive about her daughter, lethal with business dealings, seductive towards the men of the town (including younger ones), outrageous in her remarks and basically an all-around fascinating creature to behold. Actors often refer to scenes between themselves as "tennis matches," wherein one person lobs to the other and the chemistry builds from there. Anyone working opposite Hubbard was taking on the Billie Jean King or Martina Navratilova of scene-playing...! It's not that she was good. She was off-the-chain fantastic.

Lucinda was everything: Villain, victim, vindicator, snake, seducer, strategist, warrior, weasel and woman of the world. Hubbard made an acting choice to always pronounce every appropriate letter in a word, giving the dialogue an austere, haughty spin. And the writers knew she could easily handle words of four or more syllables like vituperative, recuperative and duplicitous - to name but a few - without batting an eye. (Good luck with that today...) Hubbard was nominated for a Daytime Emmy eight years in a row for her sensational work on the show.

Then disaster struck... In 1993, head writer Marland died suddenly. As the World Turns would never be the same (and neither would Lucinda, for that matter.) In 1999, upset with the character's direction, she left the show in dismay, but was soon coaxed back. (That same year, she received her final Emmy nomination for the role.) The show limped along, becoming increasingly ridiculous as so many often are, before cancellation came in 2010.

77 years of age at the time the show was canned, this would be the end of the line in many cases for an actress. And it's not as if she wasn't always busy anyway. She'd been heavily active in charity work for Bosnia (joining the board of a refugee organization) and as ATWT was withering on the vine, she'd accepted a recurring role in a Dutch show where her boyfriend resided. But her TV daughter and longtime friend/coworker was able to present her with a new opportunity.

Martha Byrne had been working on a web-based series called Anacostia, eventually becoming a producer for it. She enlisted her pal Hubbard to appear on nine episodes between 2015 and 2018 and the actress found herself breaking new ground when she was nominated still one last time for an Emmy as Outstanding Actress in a Digital Daytime Drama.

In my half-century-plus, I've seen a lot of TV and watched a lot of movies. I've been obsessed with many a person over the years (and have written about them plenty over the last 13-1/2 years here.) But no actor or actress ever inspired me as a performer the way Elizabeth Hubbard did. I straight-up stole her overly articulate manner, inflections and vast vocabulary for use in telling crazy tales to my friends and I also did everything I could think of to attempt the inventiveness and immediacy she brought to her work whenever I trod the boards. I feel like watching her perform gave me an education in itself! Examples of her work online are usually of bad video quality and can't really be appreciated as a whole without plenty of other filler. But this little (manufactured chiefly for her own benefit) speech shows the sort of variety of intonation and expression she became known for.

We bid and fond and loving farewell to one of our all-time favorite people. Not a name that would immediately come to the lips of a person not acquainted with daytime television, but, in that arena one of the true greats.