I'm Esta-tic!

Last week marked the brief--very brief, as it would turn out--return of actress Esta TerBlanche to the role of Gillian Andrassy (aka "Princess Gillian") on All My Children. Reasons #61 (Esta) and #62 (Gillian) to keep on living.

The resurrection of this fan-favorite character was extremely short but very moving, a blink-of-an-eye-moment moment that was part of a much larger, quite bizarre storyline. Essentially it goes like so: The not-so-good David Hayward, M.D. (played by the fine Rioja that is Vincent Irizarry, my pick for Emmy for Best-Looking 50-Something Pin-Up on TV, daytime or nighttime) has been bringing the late, lamented citizens of Pine Valley, Pennsylvania, back from the dead.

No, really.

You see, All My Children, just like One Life to Live, has been canceled, due to what reason exactly I could not say. Excuses--I've heard them all. A decline in ratings? Allegedly. A decrease in storyline quality over the last decade? Perhaps. A rabid desire for ABC and Disney to maximum profit and minimize creativity by replacing all the soaps with cheap, shrill talk shows? That's the one I'm betting on.

Personally, for cancelling my two favorite, remaining soaps, I hope the mouse chokes on a bar of Ivory. I'm not going to share with you in which orifice I hope they find a bottle of Downy inserted.

Although the cancellation of both shows was announced in the early spring, AMC has had an even shorter shelf-life, scheduled to depart network television on September 23 of this year. (One Life to Live won't conclude until January 2012.) So All My Children is trying to wrap up a lot of history--and, in my opinion, correct a lot of past stupid mistakes while giving as many long-term fans as possible a very happy ending--in a limited amount of time.

One approach to this has been the at-any-other-time well-beyond-belief-even-for-an-American-soap plot twist that finds ne'er-do-well David resurrecting from the dead some of Pine Valley's favorite and prematurely past-it denizens. First, it was Tad Martin's great love, Dixie Cooney, brought back to life after supposedly dying a couple of years ago from eating poisoned peanut butter pancakes. (See what I mean by stupid mistakes in the past?) Then it was Zach Slater, Kendall Hart's husband and father of some of her children (and some children of others), an all-around robust Spätburgunder, who was resurrected from the dead and now walks among Pine Valleyites, albeit in a testier, hairier form.

David has also hinted that his late brother Leo DuPres might also be alive--Leo being the great love of Greenlee Smythe's life. (I know, lots of details, but I'm going somewhere with all of this. Just hang on a sec.) By extension, David also has hinted that Ryan Lavery's late wife, the aforementioned Gillian Andrassy, might also be alive. As writer's luck would have it, Greenlee and Ryan are more or less happily in love, David and Ryan detest each other, and Greenlee at one point spurned David for Ryan. Thus, the situation is ripe for the perfect soap opera conundrum: Ryan yearns to be with Gillian but feels committed to Greenlee; Greenlee longs to return to Leo but can't because of her love and obligation to Ryan. Everybody is miserable. Except, of course, David, whose biggest thrills are healing the sick and making other people unhappy.

Not that this romantic impasse would have upset that many fans of the show. The Ryan and Greenlee pairing seems to have never been much of a fan favorite--even though various writing and production teams have rubbed the audience's collective nose in the story for almost a decade. Check out some of the soap sites, blogs, and message boards, and it becomes pretty clear that few are invested in the Ryan-Greenlee romance. Heck, I'm not even sure there's one of those cute, combined names for the couple. (GreenRee? RyLee maybe?) My perception is that the general consensus among the show's fans is that the actors, writers, characters, whatever, seem to bring out the worst in each other--completely opposite the perception of Ryan's pairing with Gillian and Greenlee's pairing with Leo during what was probably AMC's last great, golden era, the mid-1990s to early 2000s.

But the permanent recoupling of Leo and Greenlee, alas, is probably not to be, at least not in any happily-ever-after way. Leo is played by actor Josh Duhamel, he of the dazzling smile and bigger (but not necessarily better) roles on TV and in movies. Josh/Leo did make a one-day guest appearance early in August, a visitation that perfectly illustrated how, despite being absent from the show for a decade, he and his co-star, Rebecca Budig (Greenlee), still had amazing chemistry together and could pick up where they left off, no matter how ridiculous the plot twists. Nevertheless, chances are that Josh Duhamel won't be returning for an extended run to wrap up this story the way that anyone might want, in a nice, pretty package with a happily-ever-after bow tied around it.

And if the Leo-Greenlee part of the calculation can't happen, then probably the Ryan-Gillian equation won't happen either

When the Ryan-Gillian meeting did finally take place on August 24, it was a beautiful moment, a decade in the making. We got to see some wonderful flashbacks of the four or so years that the two were one of Pine Valley's most attractive and engaging pairings. And then we got to see a glimpse of Gillian as a ghost (we can only assume), with the characters acknowledging their love for one another and saying their goodbyes (again, we assume). During this scene, the tears were streaming down Esta TerBlanche's face and Cameron Mathison (Ryan) managed to do more than look stern (but, nevertheless, amazing) and clench his jaw muscles.



The whole reunion, hyped in the media for nearly a month ahead of time and hoped for for even longer than that (at least if some of the blog posts and soap boards can be taken as evidence), lasted for maybe five minutes, tops. So while a welcome and long-overdue return, it was also something of a disappointing one as well.

No disappointment as far as Esta TerBlanche is concerned, at least on my part. While she has matured since the early 2000s (haven't we all?), she still looks lovely, even as a ghost in her mid-30s with too much hair in her face. And despite apparently having retired from acting sometime in the mid-2000s, she can, even in under five minutes and in twenty words or less, convey a world of emotion. I don't know about you, but her appearance made the self-righteous, superhero-wannabe that Ryan has become appealing for the first time in ages, shirt on or off. I found myself wanting to see the two of them together again and again and again, the complex plot retcons required to do so be damned.

That's some pretty powerful acting, but Gillian was always a breakout character and Esta was always a very entertaining actress. Hopefully the clips below will show you some of her appeal. You'll see some scenes from her days on All My Children in the 1990s and 2000s, along with a guest appearance she made on the TV show Spin City during the same era. The comedy on AMC was pretty broad at the time, to put it mildly, but, nonetheless, you get a sense of the character and the actress's spirit, humor, and willingness to go the distance for a laugh.



Plus she has got to have the best eyebrows of anyone in the business.

Despite Gillian's Eurotrash wardrobe and lifestyle--the backstory: Gillian was a broke Hungarian princess who had embarrassed her family by having an affair with a married man and was, thus, exiled to her American relations in Pine Valley (hey, it could happen!)--it wasn't all fun and rain slickers on the show. The clip below offers a more serious, emotional side to Esta TerBlanche's work, part 1 of her grand goodbye to Ryan, circa late 2001. In the story, Gillian is now dead, having been accidentally shot and her heart having been donated to another, less-remembered (at least by me) character. For a couple of months, she has been haunting Ryan, unable to let go of him and her life. Finally, she has no choice.



You can watch part 2 of this scene here. It's a bit early 2000s-romance-on-the-soaps excess, replete with spare candles against a spartan background and Celine Dion (ferchrissakes) warbling on the soundtrack. But, despite the excess, it's like opening a time capsule to a lost era on soaps, way back when (but only a decade ago!), when they weren't plotted like professional football games and weren't afraid of big romantic gestures and lingering, emotional payoffs.

Apparently in real life, Esta TerBlanche decided to leave the show to return with her husband to her native South Africa--or perhaps the writers or producers decided to write her off the canvas in a big, point-of-no-return way, despite her being a popular actress playing a feisty, funny, beloved character. Who knows why the powers-that-be took such a drastic step? (Yet another stupid mistake, perchance?) At the time, it seemed that Ryan and Gillian had been written into a corner, both happily married to each other with little to do but dole out romantic advice to others. Maybe the writers needed to get the character of Ryan out of this rut, especially since the actor would be sticking around for a while. But you'd think they just might have had Gillian fall over a cliff, get sent back to Hungary, accidentally poison herself with her own goulash and fall into a deep coma. Something, anything to keep her in our thoughts and Ryan's heart.

Usually, in most soap storylines no one is ever truly dead, at least for long. But getting shot in the head, having your heart donated to another character, and making an appearance as a ghost in order to give an impassioned farewell to your beloved would certainly indicate that you must be dead in a very real and permanent way.

But never say never on a soap. Interestingly enough, Jesse, the character playing opposite Gillian in part 1, who is also playing a ghost, still managed to make a return from the dead a few years ago, even though he apparently was never really dead (although no explanation has ever been offered for his moonlighting as a ghost). Anything is possible in Pine Valley, with a little writing magic. If only there were more time, maybe we'd have a real Ryan and Gillian reunion and a long-deserved return to the spotlight for Esta TerBlanche.

Totsiens! Esta. Please let's not wait another ten years for your next resurrection.

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A little extra "Esta-cy" for your viewing pleasure: Some scenes of Esta TerBlanche when she appeared on the South African TV serial, Egoli: Place of Gold, early to mid-1990s (and then again in 2004). In Afrikaans with English subtitles.



A religious cult, a beautiful ingenue, the Afrikaner version of Sasquatch menacing everyone, and an overloaded background soundtrack. In any language, in any culture, classic soap.