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1970: Days of our Lives' Julie married Scott.

1978: Ryan's Hope's Faith prepared to married Tom.

1981: Dynasty's first season ended with the return of Alexis.

1987: Days of our Lives' Bo & Hope left Salem."History speaks to artists. It changes the artist's thinking and is constantly reshaping it into d ifferent and unexpected images."

― Anselm Kiefer

"Today in Soap Opera History" is a collection of the most memorable, interesting and influential events in the history of scripted, serialized programs. From birthdays and anniversaries to scandals and controversies, every day this column celebrates the soap opera in American culture.

On this date in...

1942: The Second Mrs. Burton premiered on the Blue Network. The radio soap opera had previously aired on CBS Radio, and would return to CBS four months later.

1970: On Days of our Lives, Julie (Susan Seaforth) finally settled the score with former best...

1970: Days of our Lives' Julie married Scott.

1978: Ryan's Hope's Faith prepared to married Tom.

1981: Dynasty's first season ended with the return of Alexis.

1987: Days of our Lives' Bo & Hope left Salem."All true histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity that the dry, shrivelled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut."

― Anne Brontë in "Agnes Grey"

"Today in Soap Opera History" is a collection of the most memorable, interesting and influential events in the history of scripted, serialized programs. From birthdays and anniversaries to scandals and controversies, every day this column celebrates the soap opera in American culture.

On this date in...

1942: The Second Mrs. Burton premiered on the Blue Network. The radio soap opera had previously aired on CBS Radio, and would return to CBS four months later.

We all know the pressures women are under in our society: to look young, thin, and beautiful forever, even more so if they're actors, especially in Hollywood. But what about the craft itself? How do older women relate to the ages of their characters? And what do they know now about the craft of acting that they didn't know when they were younger?Commit and BelieveKathleen Chalfant, a 65-year-old New York–based stage, film, and TV actor, says, "I don't have anything like as many theories about acting as I used to. If you commit to the character and believe what you're doing, audiences will believe almost anything." That goes for playing older than yourself. Last season Chalfant played a 96-year-old Armenian woman, without age makeup, in the play "Red Dog Howls" in Los Angeles. "I suppose I slightly accentuated it, but not all the time," she says of the character's age,...

Just as every actor has pre-acting rituals and every director has a rehearsal trick or two, every acting teacher seems to have an unusual technique, exercise, or theory -- some weirder than others. For example, I once had a teacher (who’ll go unnamed, God rest his soul) who was famous for an exercise he called "body taboo defiance," a fancy term for presenting a scene or monologue in your birthday suit. As I recall, the idea was to fully access your vulnerability and be in the moment -- and when I obediently participated, boy, was I in the moment. But more than 70 years after Stanislavsky died, are there any comprehensive approaches to acting that can truly be called new and different? One longtime actor told me indignantly, "There is nothing but Stanislavsky," and I replied, "You'd be surprised." I was thinking of how Anne Bogart took choreographer Mary Overlie's...