Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, February 8, 1992 TAG: 9202080093
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DANA KENNEDY ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Long
RARELY OUT OF CHARACTER
She's Brooke English, the poised, successful journalist who's juggled an overheated love life and complicated family ties for 16 years in close-knit Pine Valley. Turbulence often surrounds her friends and family, but Brooke is rock-solid.At the moment, she's pausing thoughtfully on the stairs in a restaurant, recalling something in her past before she rejoins her ex-husband at their dinner table. It's an emotional moment. As she stares wistfully into space, the red light on the ABC-TV camera abruptly goes off.
Her reverie is broken. Brooke English emits a shriek. "What's my next line?" she yells, careening down the stairs and across the set.
Flinging open the flimsy prop door, she grabs a script she's hidden outside. After scanning it, she stashes the script under a table and runs back to assume her position on the stairs. She purses her lips, the red light goes on and Brooke English is back in control. Or so it seems.
The woman who's really in control is Julia Barr, a 40-ish actress who lives in Englewood, N.J., with her husband and daughter. Since 1976, Barr has worked in character for 12 hours a day, four or five days a week on daytime's second-most popular soap opera, "All My Children." About 7 million people watch the show every day.
Barr spends almost as much time during one week being Brooke English as she does Julia Barr.
Even her friends, she says, "sometimes slip and call me Brooke."
Soap work is demanding. A sitcom like "Who's the Boss?" tapes 26 episodes every year. Soaps like "All My Children" churn out 260 episodes annually.
Major characters like Barr usually memorize between 20 and 40 pages of dialogue a day. It's grueling work; blue-collar acting. "Every night is opening night," says Agnes Nixon, 62, who created "All My Children" 21 years ago and remains head writer. "There's not much room for mistakes."
Cast members on soaps depend on each other and there's little time for prima donnas, feuds and jealousies.
Barr, who won a Daytime Emmy Award for best supporting actress in 1990, says she chose to stay with the show all these years because she wanted a secure job during her daughter's childhood.
Sometimes the two worlds of Julia Barr and Brooke English collide in unsettling ways. In 1979, Barr and a boyfriend went to the Caribbean and discovered a nude beach.
"We decided to stay there and got undressed," Barr recalls. "We're standing there naked, and I suddenly see this big fat woman waving at me and yelling, `Hey, Brooke!' "
Over the years, her character has become a parallel identity and responsibility. Barr suggests story lines involving Brooke to the show's writers. She fields correspondence from viewers, many of whom react strongly to certain story lines.
Barr monitors the kind of clothes Brooke wears and the lines Brooke speaks, insisting on different jewelry or a script change if she thinks something is inappropriate.
"But we're two totally separate people," she says. "Brooke is more serious and organized. I'm much more of a goof. And what she does for a living is totally foreign to me."
They're both petite, with reddish-blond hair and blue eyes, but Barr, who wears jeans and cowboy boots off-camera, will tell you elegant Brooke English doesn't even resemble her.
"I just don't feel she looks like me," Barr says. "Even when I get all made up to go out with my husband I look different. It's the clothes, the whole thing."
But over 16 years, there have been eerie similarities between Barr and Brooke English. When Barr began the role, she and her character both were young, single and had had problems with their mothers.
Both Barr and Brooke English have been married twice and both have given birth to a daughter. Soap being soap means Brooke has not fared as well as Barr. Her second marriage failed. Barr says hers is solid after 10 years. Brooke's daughter was killed by a drunken driver. Barr's daughter is alive and well.
But the years have been kind to them. Brooke began on "All My Children" as a spoiled, manipulative teen-ager. She's now one of the moral backbones of the show. Barr, who underwent therapy to deal with a difficult childhood, says she's grown in a similar direction.
Actress Ruth Warrick, who plays Brooke's aunt on the show, remembers Barr as "kind of unhappy" when she joined the cast.
"Julia was not very communicative," Warrick recalls. But she also remembers the day two years later when things changed between them - both on- and off-camera.
"In the story line she was falling in love and getting hurt, the way she'd hurt others," Warrick says. "My character had been a little bristly to her, but then she started to be more loving. One day, the lines we were saying were real. I remember being on the set and saying the lines and feeling it happen in real life. I got chills up my spine."
Barr begins work at 7:30 a.m. in a rehearsal hall at the ABC studios on Manhattan's West Side. The actors straggle in, sipping coffee and gazing blearily at their scripts. When they begin "dry blocking," no one seems to know their lines.
They consult their scripts like high-school thespians and recite the lines woodenly, hooting at the love scenes and goosing each other.
Learning all those lines, says Barr, depends on the actor. But hardly anyone comes in with the day's script memorized.
"Whenever I get a script, I read it right away," she says. "I spend a half hour with a script every night. But I find my most productive work is with the actor the next day."
Cast members run through the day's show three times before final taping. By dress rehearsal, the actors and actresses, with help from wardrobe and makeup, have metamorphosed into the glossy, glamorous residents of Pine Valley. Everyone hits their mark and hardly anyone forgets a line. The show begins taping at 4 p.m. and the cast goes home by 7 p.m.
Having played Brooke English for 16 years, Barr is uncertain when, if ever, she will relinquish Brooke and the salary in the "healthy six-figure range" she commands.
"I feel a real loyalty and a sense of being true to her," Barr says.
`All My Children' airs Monday through Friday at 1 p.m. on WSET-Channel 13.