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| All My Children's spoiled and selfish Erica Cudahy (Susan Lucci) wipes up the floor with her mother (Fran Helflin), and then runs to her for help whenever she gets into trouble. |
The Soap Box
Vol. IV No. 1 January 1979
Several years ago, a young actress named Christina Crawford played the jealous, insecure character of Joan Kane on The Secret Storm. When Ms. Crawford had to undergo emergency surgery, Joan Crawford, Christina's mother, stepped into the part as her understudy. At the time, it seemed like a touching gesture: the consummate actress--remembered for her spectacular, Oscar-winning performance of a devoted mother in Mildred Pierce--playing a small part on a daytime television serial on short notice. Only recently, in her best seller "Mommie Dearest"--written after her mother's death--did Christina Crawford reveal her mother's real reason for understudying the part: Jealousy. She wanted to "upstage" her own daughter!
Behind the scenes, theirs was a mother-daughter relationship filled with enormous real-life conflict not unlike the fictional relationships probed in such well-known film classics such as Stella Dallas and Imitation of Life; and in current flicks like Woody Allen's Interiors; and Ingmar Bergman's Autumn Sonata; and on virtually every afternoon television soap opera.