JACKPOT!

Daytime's Classic Heroine Goes For Broke - And Comes Up A Winner On AW

by Robert Rorke SOAP OPERA DIGEST: 1991 Almost everything about Judi Evans goes against the grain of what many people think ensures stardom in daytime drama. She's not glamorous, and she doesn't have a figure like a wishbone, yet her popularity with viewers has never abated. Nine years ago, she made a sensational debut on GUIDING LIGHT as incest victim Beth Raines. When she was nineteen, Evans won an Emmy as Best Supporting Actress and had to deal with daytime actors at their worst: jealous cast members who told her that she didn't deserve to win. She says she was glad to get out of there after three years. Her next character was low self-esteem queen Adrienne Johnson Kiriakis on DAYS OF OUR LIVES. Adrienne came on as a street kid who was turned into another incest victim ("Gee, deja vu," says Evans). Adrienne bore the message of the show to its viewers that any woman, no matter how ordinary her appearance and how deep her emotional scars, can marry a fabulously wealthy, handsome man. Evans's characters suffered and wept and wondered how people could sometimes be so mean. Audiences loved her. These days, women outside the NBC studio in residential Brooklyn wait for her to leave for lunch. "We were so angry you left DAYS," they tell her, snapping pictures. But now that she's working on ANOTHER WORLD, they get to meet her in person. They will also have the opportunily to see Evans get off that trail of tears that made Beth and Adrienne such classic, if trod-upon, soap heroines. In a bit of casting controversy, Evans is back on daytime as tough-talking siren Paulina Cory. With Paulina's low-cut dresses and sarcastic manner, audiences may get to meet the real Evans yet. The real Judi Evans likes to gamble almost as much as she likes to eat. Her favorite game is craps (at which she once won three thousand dollars in six hours.) She can't always get to Las Vegas or Atlantic City, so she'll spend her Friday nights locked into a good poker game. But she doesn't dream of owning a casino; her ultimate fantasy is to "lose weight and be a jockey." (She once broke a wild mustang.) A passionate party girl, Evans will do shots of tequila with the guys at the bar, do a one-armed push-up on the floor (though she claims she hates to work out) and make friends with everyone. At her most comfortable, she's completely unabashed. She's worked with some of the biggest egos in the business but doesn't have a drop of that prima donna blood that compels some daytime performers to treat some people like peers, some like fans and others like minions. In fact, she's so normal you forget she's an actress. At a deserted Italian restaurant near the studio, Evans reveals that she was as surprised as anyone else that Paulina came her way. "I was really nervous my first day," she recalls. "I don't know if I can play a sex kitten and be bitchy without making it look just stupid or mean. I really didn't know if I could do it, but I was excited at the chance." Cali Timmons' abrupt departure from the role fanned the flames of controversy. Viewers vented their anger about Timmins' dismissal as well as Evans' replacement of her. "How could these two actresses possibly play the same part?" they squealed. Timmons' waifish, ethereal character may have nothing in common with the wisecracking smart aleck we see now, but Evans prefers not to get involved in the fracas. "Possibly [viewers] will learn to accept me," she says. "If not, there's nothing I can do about it. Answering my critics would just infuriate them even more. It happens all the time when they replace a character. I fully expect it." She did not watch Cali Timmins "until the very last day," she says. "I did it out of respect for her and I didn't want to have her performance influence me." Before she replaced Timmins, Evans auditioned for the Anne Heche vacancy, Vicky/Marley. "I'm glad I didn't get that," she says, noting ironically, "Of course, I have to say that now." After playing two major daytime victims, Evans figured the producers would see her as Marley and make her into another Adrienne or Beth. "I wouldn't want to play a character like Adrienne again, even if I were also playing the [bad] sister." In the interim between DAYS and AW, Evans spoke to ALL MY CHILDREN about another of those eighteen-year-old victims that were Evans's stock in trade, but the twenty-seven-year-old actress knew things were getting ridiculous. "I told them I thought I was a little long in the tooth for [the role] myself," she says. "I've been eighteen three times now, including my own life. It's enough. I don't want to live it again." Unless Paulina travels back in time, she won't have to. Evans is loving the character, which she terms "fully rounded" in more ways than one. "I'm getting the biggest kick out of it," she laughs. She no to hide her body behind one of Adrienne's sackcloth specials. "You see, nice girIs don't have busts and they don't have legs and they don't have arms. Occasionally, I would get to wear a gown with some cleavage, but rarely showed my legs. I had sleeves to my wrists and nothing backless. That's a nice girl." She looks down at her breasts and says, "Oh, there they are. I knew I had two when I walked in here." Paulina will also give Evans a chance to exercise her too-long-overlooked sense of humor. "Adrienne never cracked a joke," she groans. "Adrienne never cracked a smile. I'm not afraid to make jokes here. People laugh at them." Apparently, the new Judi is pleasing some people, like her dad, Connie, a former trapeze artist, who, according to his daughter, said, " 'Now you are finally acting. No more of just that crying stuff. Now you've really hit your stride.' That was the greatest compliment I could have been given." Evans is the sole surviving performer in a circus family. "When my father married my mother, he said, 'Marry me and I will show you the world.' My mother said, 'Yes, please do, now that I've seen all the small towns.' He said, 'Well, isn't that part of the world, too?' " The Evans family worked small towns in the western United States. Judi went on the road when she was five days old, as her dad drove through the California desert to the next gig, in Flagstaff, Arizona. "There were six of us in a fifteen-foot trailer," Evans says. While her three older brothers juggled and handled props and her parents were flying on the trapeze, Evans made her debut as a clown at the age of two and a half. "I used to sit there with a maraca and go, 'Welcome to the circus, welcome to the circus,'" she remembers. Judi the clown, as she introduced herself, proved so popular that circus-goers would crowd around the trailer to see her before the show began. "The kids loved her," says Connie Evans. "A lot of little kids are scared of midgets, so they totally identified with her." Evans's mother put an end to her daughter's career as a clown. "Around the time when I was eight, these boys were saying, 'Oh, look at the cute little boy clown,' and I would say, 'I'm a girl!' and these little jerk kids would say, 'Oh, yeah? Prove it!' I didn't understand what they meant. I told my mama and she said, 'Time to be a girl!' I love her dearly, but I will never forgive her," Judi says. "I had to become a lady." Connie Evans sold his circus shortly thereafter, though Judi went on to study acting. She was hired to play Beth Raines on GL when she was eighteen, and entered into a series of relationships with older men. One, with former GL executive producer John Whitesell, created professional fireworks. "One time when John was directing, he came out screaming at me, got me to tears," Evans says. "I wasn't playing the scene right. He wouldn't have screamed at anyone else like that. He also knew he couldn't scream at anyone else like that." Castmates accused Evans of being a favorite, but the actress contends that, "I never got any special treatment." Snagging the Emmy (in a year when no other GL actors were nominated) seemed to be the final straw. "It was a wonderful night for me, but it caused a lot of problems at work," Evans relates. "It wasn't my fault that I won, but for years I was embarrassed about it. I allowed that to happen to me. I was a young girl and I was real naive. I was a much nicer girl than I am today." After her early harsh experiences, she has emerged a self-reliant, self-confident woman. "I can't make everybody like me, it's too much like work," she says with conviction. Speaking of work, soap operas are for Evans, just that: a job. "Sometimes the people who cause a lot of problems get more attention," she says. "My job is not to rewrite or tell makeup and hair how to do their thing. Jane Elliot (ex-Anjelica, DAYS; Tracy, GH) taught me that. She told me, 'Say your lines, don't bump into the furniture and go home.' They tell me to cut my hair, I cut it. They tell me to dye my hair, I dye it. Fighting about it is too much like work. You should go to work and have a good time or don't go." One reason she no longer gets wrapped up in on-the-set shenanigans is because her life outside daytime is much more secure. Evans did not renew her contract with DAYS in order to move to the East Coast to be with her husband, shoe manufacturer Robert Eth. Eleven years older than his bride, Eth is regularly teased about his age. "Honey, tell me about the sixties, since I was born after JFK was shot," Evans will say to him. "And he's like, 'Shut up.' Or the Beatles will be on and I'll say, 'The Rolling Stones, I love them.' He doesn't think that's so funny." She describes herself and her husband as "very different people. We need some time to adjust to that. Now we are going through our honeymoon years, which we should have gone through, but we're finally living together for the first time. We have a very trusting relationship. I believe in him and he believes in me." While she's settling in on the East Coast, Evans is going to try to put together an all-female poker game to replace the one that she left behind in Los Angeles. "No drinking, no smoking, serious poker," she says. She'll miss those four-hour drives to Las Vegas to hit the blackjack table ("You can't wait to get there, but then you're so de- pressed on the way home"), but maybe she can persuade fellow gambler Russell Todd (Jamie) to go to Atlantic City. She loves to play when the stakes are high. "When you're on a good roll there is nothing in this world like it," she says, her blue eyes bright with excitement and her voice rising. "You're hitting points and money keeps rolling in and I'm like, 'I love this.' " # Return to Press Index