Lisa Grimaldi
Lisa Grimaldi is a fictional character from the CBS soap opera, As the World Turns. The character was portrayed by Eileen Fulton for 50 years from May 1960, until the last episode aired in September 2010, with Fulton becoming one of the longest-serving soap opera actors in the United States. Lisa is considered to be the first soap "vixen" and was one half of the first ever super couple, Bob and Lisa Hughes.
Casting
As the World Turns creator and longtime head writer Irna Phillips created Lisa in the late 1950s as a short-term character. In a 2007 interview with the Archive of American Television, Fulton explained that ATWT's casting director contacted her agent, wanting to audition another of his clients, Lois Smith, for the role, but because Smith was unavailable, he recommended they audition Fulton instead. Lisa was kept on the As the World Turns canvas due to Fulton's day-to-day acting improvement. A Procter & Gamble executive said to Fulton six months into her run as Lisa, "I want to tell you what a wonderful job you are doing, because when you first came on the show we thought, 'We can't keep her. She's not very good.'"Fulton's eagerness to play Lisa as a villainess contributed to the character's popularity and therefore its longevity. In the Archive of American Television interview, Fulton explained that the character was originally written to be a "nice girl", which she did not find compelling as an actress, and that, while she read Phillips' lines exactly as they appeared on the script, she said them with a "scheming tone" in her voice. When Phillips saw Fulton's performance she said "I can write for that little rascal. She can play a bitch!" In The Soap Opera Encyclopedia, Christopher Schermering writes, "Although Lisa was guilty of many lapses, nothing made her more hated by her audience of housewives than a simple sequence in which she hired a maid to clean house and went gallivanting about town. When mother-in-law Nancy complimented Lisa on what a nice home she had made for Bob, audiences were furious."
A scheming "vixen" in her early years, TIME magazine once referred to Lisa as a "superbitch" and the "most hated woman on TV." Since those days, Lisa has gone on to become a well-respected presence in Oakdale, often offering advice and support to the town's younger residents.
When the character of Lisa was introduced in 1960, the name "Lisa," which had only seen a popular resurgence in the previous ten years, was the sixth most popular baby name in the United States. Fulton's Lisa was credited with speeding up the popularity of the name for baby girls; "Lisa" became the most popular name for girls between the years of 1962 and 1969.
Image:Lisag1960.jpg|thumb|left|180px|Lisa back in a 1960s episode
The character departed on May 3, 1965, and briefly crossed over into her own primetime spinoff series, Our Private World, for a few months in 1965, during which Lisa left Oakdale and moved to Chicago. She returned to Oakdale on January 16, 1967, where she remained until the final episode in 2010.
Recasts for Lisa were Pamela King filling in as Lisa during 1964 and Betsy von Furstenberg playing the role from late 1983 to early 1984 during a contract dispute between Ms. Fulton and Procter & Gamble. On multiple occasions from 1991 to 1994, former movie actress Jane Powell and soap opera veterans Maeve McGuire replaced Ms. Fulton during that same the time period as did soap opera veteran Jennifer Bassey. Australian actress Carmen Duncan, best known to American audiences for her role as Iris #3 on Another World, filled in for Fulton for three episodes in late 2004 while she was on emergency medical leave.
By the 1970s, Fulton's Lisa was always credited at the end of each program, after the names of the rest of the cast appeared in the credits. The character had become so integral to the story on As the World Turns that by 1987, actress Fulton was credited with playing the role of "Lisa" at the end of each day's show, and not with a surname. Fulton would be credited simply as playing "Lisa" with no character surname until the show ended its run in 2010. In its final years, Fulton along with a number of other veteran actors were rarely seen on canvas. In a 2009 interview, Fulton was confused as to why the writers found it so difficult to write for older characters.
"It could be an age thing, but one of my favorite soaps is the British series EastEnders. They have no problem with featuring older actors. And giving them romantic and dramatic storylines."
Character history
Bob and "Scheming Lisa"
The character first appeared in May 1960, as the fiancée of medical student Bob Hughes. They soon eloped when they discovered that Lisa was pregnant. Though Bob's and Lisa's parents were at first opposed to their marriage, they accepted it when they learned of Lisa's pregnancy. The young couple moved in with Bob's parents, Chris and Nancy Hughes, while Bob finished his residency at Oakdale Memorial Hospital. Lisa initially demonstrated her scheming ways by faking "difficulties" with her pregnancy to get out of helping her new mother-in-law with the household chores. However, Nancy and Lisa eventually became very close, forming a bond that would remain intact for decades. Lisa's new sister-in-law, however, Penny Hughes and Lisa took an immediate dislike to one another. Penny, who had lost a baby, and recently learned she could no longer have children, resented Lisa's pregnancy. Lisa disliked Penny and her best friend Ellen Lowell, who she felt thought they were better than herself, while Ellen and Penny found Lisa to be an idle gossip. The animosity between Penny and Lisa led to considerable tension in the Hughes home, with Lisa exploiting Penny's emotional estrangement from Chris and Nancy, attempting to further alienate Penny from her parents.A year into Bob and Lisa's marriage, after their son Tom was born, Lisa became tired of living as the wife of a young resident, resenting Bob's long hours in the hospital. She had an affair with flashy businessman Bruce Elliott, asking him to take her with him when she left town, but he told her the affair was just a diversion for him, and that he cared nothing for her. Meanwhile, Bob, whom she had already alienated, had found out about the relationship and divorced Lisa. Lisa responded by poisoning Tom's mind against his father, eventually fleeing to California with Tom, without Bob's knowledge. When Bob finally tracked them down, he found Lisa in a near-catatonic state, following a brutal rape. He brought her back to Oakdale, enlisting the help of Sylvia Hill, a nurse with whom Bob had been involved. Once Lisa recovered from the trauma, she attempted to guilt Sylvia into ending her relationship with Bob, falsely suggesting that she was the only thing preventing Bob and Lisa to reconcile. Nancy also cautioned Sylvia that Lisa was the only person she would ever accept as her daughter-in-law. Though Sylvia eventually decided to end her relationship with Bob, Bob informed Lisa that he was not interested in a reconciliation with her.
''Our Private World''
Rejected, Lisa moved to Chicago in mid-1965, where she became involved with the Eldridge brothers. She married wealthy John Eldridge, but soon began a torrid affair with his brother Tom. When the affair was revealed, Lisa fled Chicago in disgrace. It was revealed in the early 1990s that Lisa was in fact pregnant when she left, and that the Eldridge family had paid Lisa a hefty divorce settlement, in exchange for her having nothing to do with her baby. The baby, Scott Eldridge, was presumably born during the several-month-long lapse between when Our Private World went off the air in the fall of 1965 and when Lisa returned to As the World Turns in the spring of 1966. Viewers were not made aware of Scott's existence until he tracked Lisa down as an adult in 1992.Return to Oakdale
Several months after leaving Chicago, Lisa resurfaced in Oakdale, and began having an affair with Dr. Michael Shea, a charming, manipulative sociopath. Though she asked Michael to leave his wife so they could be married, especially after Lisa discovered she was pregnant, Michael refused. After Lisa's baby, Charles "Chuckie" Shea was born, Lisa told Michael's wife about the affair and her son. Clare was drinking, something she did a lot of in those days. Claire told Michael she wanted him to marry Lisa and make his son legitimate. Claire then let it slip that there had been another illegitimate child in the family. Michael put things together and figured out that Ellen was the mother of that child and that her son was Dr. Dan Stewart, a bright young doctor that Shea resented. He made it his business to tell Dan the truth. When Claire learned this, she stabbed him with a letter opener. Michael, who had been let go from Memorial Hospital after the loss of a patient, agreed to keep quiet about what Claire had done if he could be reinstated. Claire divorced Michael.A short while later, Michael decided that he wanted to play a role in his son's life, and tried to get Lisa to marry him, but by this time, she wanted nothing to do with him. Around the same time, Lisa's son Tom had returned from Vietnam with a drug habit. One night, Michael caught Tom breaking into his office to steal drugs, and Michael used this information to blackmail Lisa into marrying him. By this time, Lisa hated Michael with a passion, and though she did marry him, she refused to have any kind of a sexual relationship with him. Michael responded by orchestrating a series of events designed to make Lisa appear as an unfit mother, so he could divorce her and sue for custody of Chuckie. However, in early 1970, Michael was murdered, and Lisa was nowhere to be found. Tom was the prime suspect, and, thinking his mother had committed the murder, he said little to demonstrate his innocence. When Lisa returned to town, she could not remember the events leading to Michael's murder, but eventually the murder was revealed to have been committed by the mother of a young woman with whom Michael had had an affair.
Lisa had a few more flings, including one with Bob's older brother, Don Hughes, attorney Dick Martin, minister Wally Matthews, and the rich Simon Gilby. Around this time, she believed herself to be pregnant, though her doctor revealed Lisa suffered from an ovarian cyst.