You know how it is when you have a little time - maybe you've been moving at a million miles per hour for weeks and your brain just needs a bit of a rest. Or maybe you have time to kill between things and it's not really enough time to pick up a book. If you are like me, you start to surf Google. Sometimes Google takes me in weird and wonderful directions, and this happened just a few days ago.
I had just seen Jean Smart on an episode of FRASIER so I thought I'd look at what she's been up to.
That led me to the Wiki about DESIGNING WOMEN, and, specifically, the infamous fight that Suzanne's portrayer Delta Burke had with the producers which got her canned from the show.
A couple years later, they all made up and spun her off into her own show, WOMEN OF THE HOUSE. I forgot that the show even existed (although not too many people knew it existed at the time which is why it got cancelled after one season).
But I was looking through the cast list and noticed actor Charles Frank. He had portrayed Dr. Jeff Martin on ALL MY CHILDREN. I watched from an early age with my mom, my sister, and our housekeeper Mrs. K. My mom's mom Thelma stopped watching the show after the character of "Little Charlie" mouthed off to his parents. Thelma was born in 1904 and did NOT suffer mouthy children! But I digress.
Anyway, I loved ALL MY CHILDREN and that led me to the character bio of Phoebe Wallingford, as portrayed by the actress Ruth Warrick. Such an amazing character actress who played this arch matriarch with such precision as to be supremely horrible and utterly loveable at the same time. Ah, those were really great days of classic soap. :)
Did you know that Ruth Warrick played opposite Orson Welles in CITIZEN KANE? I did but was reminded of it in my Google-quest (and yes, I find it funny that one of her Phoebe signature lines was "that KANE woman!").
So, it appears that the line from Jean Smart to CITIZEN KANE is fairly easy to trace. As it should be, Jean Smart is awesome (except I didn't care for her character on FRASIER, but that's a topic for another day).
As a side note, I once knew a drag queen here in New York that could (and would, unasked) recite the entire "and THAT'S the night the lights went out in GEOR JAH!" speech from DESIGNING WOMEN's first episode. Verbatim. So that's something to note.
Happy Tuesday!
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Johns and Marys 5: Boys Don't Kiss Other Boys