Fulton spent nearly 50 years playing the soap opera villainess Lisa Miller.
Eileen Fulton, who was one of the first “bad girls” of daytime television and spent nearly 50 years playing the vixen villain of As The World Turns, has died. She was 91.
Fulton died July 14 in her hometown of Asheville, N.C., after “a period of declining health,” her family announced in an obituary.
Representatives for Fulton did not immediately respond to Entertainment Weekly’s request for comment.
Born Margaret Elizabeth McLarty in Asheville on Sept. 13, 1933, Fulton graduated from Greensboro College with a bachelor’s degree in music in 1956 before moving to New York to pursue an acting career. There, she studied under Sanford Meisner and Lee Strasberg at the Neighborhood Playhouse and studied dance with Martha Graham. She supported herself with a variety of jobs, including modeling, before landing a role in the 1960 film Girl of the Night alongside Anne Francis.
Her rise to daytime stardom began that same year when she was cast as Lisa Miller (later Lisa Grimaldi) on the CBS soap As the World Turns. Originally written to be a “nice girl” with a summerlong arc, Lisa was married to Dr. Bob Hughes (Don Hastings). But when the writers heard Fulton deliver Lisa’s lines, she became a villainess. Lisa was soon labeled a scheming “vixen,” with Time magazine referring to her at one point as a “superbitch” and the “most hated woman on TV.”
Fulton saw herself earning that title as proof that she was connecting with the audience. “They hated her — and I thought it was fabulous,” she told NPR in 2010, recalling the fan interaction that cemented her reputation. “I was standing in front of Lord & Taylor. I’d only been on the show a few weeks. And this beautifully dressed woman in a Chanel suit — in the days before there were knockoffs — came up to me and said, ‘Aren’t you Lisa?’ And I said, ‘Yes, that’s the part I play.’ And she said, ‘Well, I hate you!’ And she hit me!”
Fulton continued, “And people looked at me like I was rotten and this woman was a heroine. But I thought, ‘You know what? I’ve reached them.’ Then a telegram came into the studio. It said, ‘If that bitch Lisa marries Bob I’ll never watch As the World Turns again.’ That is how the character was truly locked in.”
Fulton also faced fan backlash for her so-called “Granny clause.” It came about in the ’60s, when her onscreen son was aged up from 12 to 19 and began a relationship headed for marriage.
“I realized that if my son got married, I would be a grandmother,” Fulton recalled to NPR. “I remembered seeing Barbara Berjer, who played Claire Cassen. They grew up her daughter and granddaughter and a lot of people. Here she is looking so beautiful, and suddenly they realized, ‘My God, she’s going to be a great grandmother on our show. We have to kill her.’ So they hit her with a truck. I thought: ‘Wait a minute. That is not going to happen to me.'”
She thus insisted on a clause in her contact stating that Lisa’s son and his first wife, Carol, would not have a baby. When Carol was revealed to be sterile, viewers were outraged.
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Fulton left the show several times over the years, initially quitting in 1963 to pursue other roles. She starred in an Off Broadway production of Abe Lincoln in Illinois opposite Hal Holbrook, but when viewers didn’t take to her replacement on the soap, Pamela King, she returned.
She left again in 1965 to star in a prime-time spinoff of the soap, Our Private World. The series saw her character flee to Oakdale, Calif., to wed the wealthy John Eldridge, but it was canceled after four months, and Fulton returned to ATWT.
She ultimately starred as Lisa from May 1960 through September 2010, when the show went off the air, ending her run as one of the longest-tenured soap opera stars in U.S. history. In 2004, she was awarded a Daytime Emmy Lifetime Achievement Award for the role.
In addition to being a soap star, Fulton co-authored several murder mysteries, two autobiographies (1970’s How My World Turns and 1995’s As My World Still Turns), and 1999’s Soap Opera: A Novel. She was also a singer, performing a cabaret act at venues across New York and Los Angeles. She retired in 2019.
She is survived by her brother, Charles Furman McLarty; her niece Katherine Morris; and her niece’s children, Everly Ann Morris and Easton Lane Morris.
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