If you want to know about Grant Aleksander (Phillip, GUIDING LIGHT), listen to this story: He's at a photo shoot, chatting with a Digest staff member who's telling him that she's about to go on vacation and hopes her sick cat will be okay while she's away. "Where are you going?" Aleksander inquires earnestly. Assuming he's interested in her destination, the editor tells him, "Colorado." "Oh, well that's good," Aleksander replies, visibly and incredibly relieved. "You're close enough to fly home if anything happens."

It might sound surprising, but ask Aleksander -- who, still in one of Phillip's suits, is giving up his lunch hour for this interview -- what the No. 1 thing people say about him is, and he answers, "animals" without a second's hesitation. (He'll say No.2 is that he's a pain in the a--.) The passion he and wife Sherry Ramsey have for furry creatures has brought 11 cats and three dogs to their New Jersey home. Need a cat? "Don't get one from Grant," one castmate whispers. "It'll have one eye and three legs."

It might sound like a joke, but such a commitment says a lot about a man who seemingly has the world at his feet: He owns four homes, is happily married to his college sweetheart, has worked fairly steadily since 1982, enjoys enormous popularity and a not-too-shabby paycheck -- and really doesn't have to be responsible for anything. It shows that Aleksander is a person who understands that going with his feelings might not always fit the plan.

Case in point: Aleksander never set his hopes on getting married, but if you ask those who know the actor what else they've got to say about him, they always mention the phenomenal relationship that he shares with Sherry, whom he met at Washington and Lee University when she played Ophelia to his Hamlet. "There's nothing that I'm more proud of than that we've been together for 20 years," he boasts. "Strangely enough, I thought that I would never get married. I'm a little bit like the Jimmy Stewart character in It's A Wonderful Life. I was just always full of piss and vinegar and figured that I would travel the world and do crazy things. I was really not happy having met Sherry [at 19 years old]. I fought it, but I knew that it was not a fight I was going to win. The early years are very tough; your hormones are telling you that you just want to be going crazy, but you gut it out and try to get to the other side."

Nearing 40 this August, Aleksander marvels that he and and his wife have reached the other side in yet another way -- they'll then have been together longer than they've been apart. For Aleksander, that's about the only thing worth mentioning about the big 4-0.

"Thirty didn't bother me, 40 isn't going to bother me," he asserts. "Fifty might because there's only so much you can do to keep yourself physically together. At 40, I can still do anything I did when I was 20. I think in this decade, I'll realize that there is some stuff you've got to let go of."

And maybe some things he has to add. "At this point in my life, what I choose to do isn't tied to anything other than what I really want to do," Aleksander explains. "But knowing that I don't have to make a living anymore makes me feel a much greater responsibility. You can make a good choice, a powerful choice, an enlightened choice, and I feel a certain amount of pressure to make a better choice than just, 'Hey, I'm going to get DirecTV and watch every Orioles game that comes on this year.' Because I can do that, but that's just not good enough."

What is? For starters, more work with animals. "I will start focusing more intently on spending more time doing that," he says. Kids? "We have talked about that. Our problem has always been that we've been so busy, and I know that we're not part-time parent kind of people. I don't know. I've always thought that we could end up with a child in the same way that we've ended up with all our animals; here's the kid who nobody wants who's been kicked around. I could see us ending up with one of those." Career? "I really, really want to start doing theater again and [in film], I'd love to be that third guy who you kind of know, but you don't know. I don't want to be any more famous than I am now -- ever."

Hard to believe there's an actor out there who doesn't want an Oscar, but Aleksander says he lost his big-star dreams very early on. "That part of it for me was about personal validation, about not being that little fat kid anymore," he muses. "My years from 10 through 13, I was bookish and fat. I probably weighed 180 pounds at a height of 5-feet-3. And part of me wanted to finally put those demons to rest, 'Hey, I made it. I'm a big deal.' I realized after being with Sherry for a while that there wasn't much left to lay to rest because I love her, and very often I would look at her and be so overwhelmed by the kind of person that she is that I would think, 'You know what'? If this person chooses to be with me, then I must be pretty okay, too.' I love acting, but I don't care that much about the attention part of it and I haven't for a long time."

And if he ever left acting behind, Aleksander would like to write and make furniture. "I love woodworking; I love doing things with my hands," he offers. In Aleksander's life, there doesn't need to be a better reason than that. #

SIDEBAR: Living With The Lie

When Grant Aleksander heard that GL brass wanted Phillip to pretend that Beth's baby was Jim's, he felt compelled to say something about it.

"I said that this would be a problem because many years before, I did 10 years of story about Phillip being the son of another man [Justin Marler] and not finding out until he was older," Aleksander explains. "Phillip swore he could never do this to a child of his own, and I knew it would be a very difficult thing to sell to [long-time fans]."

What ensued was a discussion about Phillip's history, intense scenes where Phillip tells Beth that even though he was betrayed a long time ago, he's still not over it, scenes where Rick and Phillip talk about Phillip fathering Meredith's baby, scenes where Alan and Phillip talk about what might have been--and a compromise.

"They wanted to get it to a point where Phillip would agree to pretend, at least for the time being, that this child was not his," Aleksander shares. "What made the most sense was to have it be a threat to Beth, not a concern for the child because the child hopelessly complicates his life at this point. And since there was no physical reason that she shouldn't have an abortion, we decided to go more for a mental stability thing. I still struggle with it because it's a tough beat for Phillip to agree to pretend that a child of his is someone else's because this is who he is at his core. But we tried to play it up as much as we could and ask the audience to go along with it."