THE WORLD LOSES A LEGEND

MARY STUART

1926 - 2002

Mary Stuart (Jo, SFT; Meta, GL) passed away at age 75 in her home in New York City on Feb. 28, due to complications from a stroke. In the spring of 1999, after complaints of stomach irritation, the actress had an endoscopy performed and a large tumor was discovered. Six days later, she was operated on and the tumor was removed. She then had chemo until the following December. The actress also survived a bout with breast cancer in 1988.

Born July 4, 1926, Mary Stuart entered daytime in 1951 by taking the role of Jo Barron on a new soap opera, Search For Tomorrow. She played the heroine until the show’s final episode in 1986. While in later years, Jo often would be seen doling out advice to the younger set, in the early days she was just as often seen playing guitar and singing a song. After a brief stint playing Judge Claire Webber on OLTL in 1988, Stuart would not be seen on a soap again until Guiding Light wisely brought her on to play Bauer matriarch, Meta, in 1996; a role she played until her death. Besides a career that spanned over 50 years in daytime, the actress performed in many movies. She was in The Cariboo Trail with Randolph Scott, The Adventures of Don Juan with Errol Flynn and The Big Punch with Gordon MacRae, just to name a few. In 1992, Stuart started BOOK PALS, a reading program that had her reading to school children in New York City.

Stuart truly understood the impact she had on fans, having played the same role for so long, knowing many had grown up watching her. She was overheard asking one if she “had raised her too.” She had become everyone’s grandmother figure, the one they wished they had. But she wasn’t only beloved by viewers. She will be missed by her colleagues as well.

The recipient of four Daytime Emmy nominations, she was awarded special lifetime achievement recognition for her popular role as Joanne Tate on Search For Tomorrow. Last October, Procter & Gamble Productions celebrated Stuart and her 50-year-contribution to daytime television.

Below is a partial text of the speech she made in her 50-year-contribution to daytime television:

"Thank you all for showing up. I don't know why I'm getting all this -- everybody else had to retire or die to get a party. All I had to do was hang around for fifty years.

Fifty years! I guess that puts an end to the myth that I'm 49.

I will admit I am, and always have been, so glad and so proud and grateful that I just happened to be among the lucky few who first set foot in the new world of daytime television. There weren't very many of us and there wasn't much growing here.

We started life in Leiderkranz Hall, a funny old Victorian opera house on 58th Street that Bill Paley [creator of the CBS network] had made into four studios just for soaps. He was one of the first believers. There were two studios downstairs and two up a flight of stairs -- and a grand flight of stairs it was. A grand staircase but no dressing rooms, but then we didn't have clothes so that didn't really matter. We had little lockers like you have in school in what had probably been a small cloakroom. Oh yes, that small cloakroom was also the makeup room for everybody!

We had no rehearsal hall so we did our dry rehearsal in an office over on Madison, but we did have three hours in the studio to block and rehearse and broadcast a live show. Oh, did I mention with two live commercials? There were days the suits outnumbered the actors two to one.

Production was simple. It had to be. We didn't have sets or money to buy any. We started life on a total budget of $9,337.29 a week! And that was for everything: salaries, production, even the coffee and bagels. To indicate rooms, instead of sets, they hung black curtains around the studio and doorframes and window frames and pictures in thin air. It was a nice idea -- and cheap -- but it didn't work. Somebody was always where he shouldn't be, like strolling by outside the window, when it was supposedly seven stories above the ground. But miracle of miracles, at the end of the first 13 weeks we had some money left over from our $9,337.29 budget so we bought some sets -- not real sets -- just some flats, and they were all painted black so all the rooms were pretty somber but it didn't seem to matter. We had begun! We had begun and I think we knew from the beginning it was going to be a great adventure.

You see, we had some great, great partners. We had some gentlemen from a company in Ohio [Procter & Gamble] who were also stepping into that new world for the first time and who were deeply and wisely involved from the first day. There had been a number of those gentlemen, all dear friends, in the course of these fifty years, and that first one was Bill Craig.

We also had some really interesting roommates in our opera house: Ernie Kovacs, who was surely a certifiable maniac, was upstairs and so was Captain Kangaroo, although they were both really all over the building. Ernie used the halls as an extra set and the Captain used them as a zoo.

We also had some wonderful actors: Bess Johnson came from radio; Cliff Hall came from vaudeville; Johnny Sylvester was a beginner, like me; my dear friend, and my buddy through 35 lovely years, Melba Rae; Larry Haines came on a few months later; Lee Grant and Don Knotts were, as we all know, destined to be legends. But in 1951, we were all just kids together.

Our crews were right out of the signal corps and our equipment was problematic. If more than one camera went out, we kept talking and just stood very close to each other. If the sync generator went out, we knew the camera couldn't see us so we stayed in front of them. If the lights went out, we sat down and just kept talking 'til somebody brought hand-held lights and held them in front of us. But amazingly, most days went without major mishap. I do believe God has a soft spot for actors.

We also had a wonderful, imaginative, inventive director: Charles Irving, who learned early on to invent what we needed -- and we needed just about everything. He was the first kid on the block to own a Polaroid camera -- and that's how we did cutaways and insert shots. He managed somehow to keep five actors busy for one solid week chasing each other through a forest, a forest that consisted of fifteen or twenty music stands with branches tied to them and two artificial trees. Just remembering where we were was a triumph!

We also had a really interesting floor manager named Joe Papp. When he started his first outdoor theater, we borrowed lights and sound equipment from the studio, loaded it on a truck and hauled it to the Lower East Side and helped him set up the first production.

We had no sets, no costumes, no props and no furniture to speak of. All we had was each other. It was enough. In many ways that dependence is still the secret strength of daytime.

Whatever we were doing, it worked. We were an overnight success. Granted, there wasn't all that much competition. But clearly, the audience connected to us, and a little later, to Love of Life and then to Guiding Light. They were right next door so we grew up together.

We were in that building for seventeen years -- the seventeen years we were still live. We never had dressing rooms. We all had babies and let me tell you, dressing behind a twelve-inch locker door when three of you are pregnant is not a pretty sight. And Leiderkranz Hall continued to be an adventure in itself. The shows all had children; they played cops and robbers in the halls. Just walking up the steps was hazardous. You stepped over a basket of the Captain's snakes or around his goats. And on one of my all-time favorite days, Gloria Monty [then a director] had just run down from her show to the only bathroom, just before she was due on the air live. But while she was in the bathroom, the Captain's baby elephant started up the stairs and was taking up all the space. She took one look and roared, "Tell that elephant to get out of my way." The stagehand turned and just shook his head, "No lady," he said, "you tell that elephant to get out of our way."

Somewhere, along the way, daytime had come into its own. All three networks had a full schedule, the shows were longer, they had big budgets and a very fancy production. Daytime had become a very big business.

I told you these stories because most of it happened before you were born and I thought you might like to know how it was in the beginning. I've been in so many studios since and a very nice thing happened: Search for Tomorrow did its last show on the sixth floor at 222 East 44th Street and quite magically, that's right where Meta's kitchen is now. But to tell you the truth, it never has really mattered where we were. It still doesn't. As long as I can see that little red light, I feel right at home.

I love our medium, the way we work. I love the size of the screen. I love the fact that our audience is very often alone when they watch so it's a real conversation, an intimate, private conversation.

I have always been so proud and so grateful, just of having the privilege of working with so many hundreds of wonderful actors. You guys are the best people on earth, the kindest, most generous, thoughtful, sensitive [people]. So many of ours became big names in the business and I'm proud of them.

Susan Sarandon played a sassy little hippy and was around for a year, draping her cute little body all over the place, making jelly for everybody. Kevin Kline would very often ask me to watch a scene. He told me years later that when he started Sophie's Choice, he panicked at first. It was going so fast, and then he remembered, "I know how to do that. That's how we worked on Search for Tomorrow." Then he said, "But if I hadn't done Search, I couldn't have done Sophie's." All of them -- Jill Clayburgh, Kevin Bacon, Olympia Dukakis and amazing little Jane Krakowski, who can obviously do absolutely anything -- they all brought something special and wonderful.

But what I'm most proud of now, after these fifty years of working with you, watching you, is what all of you have done, what you do everyday. The way you memorize the equivalent of War and Peace and you make it work. I love the way you listen and feel and care. It's all real -- and all those folks out there know it -- and that matters. When you feel something, so do they. That's wonderful. I love to watch you work, the little things you do that flicker across your face, across the screen, the marvelous characters you become, sometimes more than one at a time -- it's all there. It's a wonderful gift and you give so freely. You made such a big difference in so many millions of lives. When you listen, they listen; when you identify, they can.

These fifty years have seen more social change in this country then the rest of our history put together. You've given people a chance to visualize and see themselves in those new realities. You've made daytime into a real medium -- original, like jazz and musical comedy. You did it!

In 1976, I made a speech at our 25th anniversary [party] and if you don't mind, I'd like to repeat a little of it. I said, "Twenty-five years ago, I turned a corner in my life and came upon an empty space. It was not a plain or a meadow, not a field or a mountain. It was just a space. Three wise men, Charles Irving, Roy Winsor [creator of SFT] and Bill Craig, coming from separate directions, turned corners in their own lives and came upon the same space… and they had an idea. Where there had been nothing, we built a town. People came to live there, they married and had children. They built businesses, kids went to school and grew up. People came there from other towns and it grew into a city.

Oh, you can't find it on a map, and at night the houses and the shops come apart and are stored in scenery docks -- but it's all real. If you don't believe me, ask millions of people all over the country and they will tell you it's real. Perhaps a special kind of real that is a little gentler. It is a place to share an idea, a fantasy, a friend, an emotion. Those emotions are not play pretend. We all know that, and so do they. If that is not reality, I don't know what is."

Co-Workers Salute Mary Stuart

Matt Ashford (Jack, Days; ex-Cagney, SFT):
Mary taught me a lot about the combination of professionalism and having a sense of humor. Her idea of longevity was she never out-priced herself. She never thought of herself as being too important for the show, and she always saw herself in the context of the show and being part of the story, rather than being someone who is greater than the show. I first heard that idea from her, and her long career proves its value. She made me think of a female Jack Benny, with her incredible sense of timing. She had a way of acting and certain mannerisms that made you think, “Where did that come from?” And she got it from the days of live television. When an actor messed up and it was live, the cameras always swung to Mary to save the scene. Always. So that’s what she had to do. She had to remember their lines, her lines, what the story was, everything. She had to just keep talking. She had developed that thinking on her feet thing that I recognized, and I still think is a great thing to have.

John Aniston (Victor, Days; ex-Martin, SFT):
She was a grande dame of the theater. If there is a hall of fame for soap actors, she should be in it.

Mary is survived by her husband of more than 20 years, architect Wolfgang Neumann; her two children from a previous marriage, Jeffrey Krolik and Cynthia Stuart; and two grandchildren.

..........................................................................................

"Mary, your search is over, may your tomorrows be
forever peaceful. You will be loved and missed.Thanks for all"

 

From Soap City.com