from the annals of classic soaps
Jul. 5th, 2021 03:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwynnegaOne of the things I love about classic soap operas, even though they can be slow-moving and ponderous, is that you end up encountering actors you never would have known about otherwise. This is especially true of the New York soaps, which drew a lot of their casts from the theater world. Lately I've been watching a storyline on The Doctors from 1968-69. (I've seen it before, a few years back, when the retro TV station that airs the program last showed it.) The story features Ralph Purdum as Philip Townsend, the repellent, supercilious Chairman of the Board at Hope Memorial Hospital. When he meets young nurse's aide Liz Wilson, everyone is surprised by how docile and kind he becomes in her presence. Then Philip stalks and kidnaps Liz, because she bears a striking resemblance to his dead daughter Melisande. He engineers it to appear to her friends and colleagues that she's in Paris with her father, but in reality he locks her in his daughter's room at his mansion.
There's nothing sexual going on here (in fact Philip's affect reminds me of a non-comedic Paul Lynde). Rather, Philip keeps trying to get Liz to study ballet, read the classics, and learn French--all the things he forced his daughter to do once his wife passed away. Eventually Liz discovers Melisande's diary, which reveals that, driven to despair by her father's controlling and increasingly violent ways (including locking her in her room), the girl committed suicide. Philip becomes more and more brittle, erratic, and violent because Liz refuses to pretend to be Melisande and keeps trying to escape. Back in the outside world, Liz's friends finally begin to put it together that she isn't in Paris, but, satisfyingly, Liz manages to rescue herself by forcing Philip to read his daughter's diary. This makes him unravel completely, whereupon she takes the room key from him and is just opening the front door of the mansion when her friends show up to save her.
When she and her friends go back up to Melisande's room, Philip is wandering in and out of reality, recounting favorite anecdotes about his daughter's precocity, and going incandescent with pain as he faces up to her death. Soap opera performances often resemble live theater more than film or weekly TV shows, because the actors usually only get one chance to do the scene. Purdum's performance here is electrifying in its pathos, though to the end, Philip never becomes an iota more likeable (and I like that about this storyline).
There's a different kind of pathos in realizing that Purdum probably never expected his very good performances on The Doctors to see the light of day after they aired the first time. I looked him up online. He has a handful of TV and film credits. According to his New York Times obituary, he "appeared as Bud Frump in the Broadway production of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and in the original productions of Irwin Shaw's Children From Their Games in 1963 and the Lorraine Hansberry play Les Blancs in 1970." He died of pancreatic cancer at the age of sixty-three. I am glad to have encountered him on The Doctors.
Also, his wife was named...Melisande! (She was in the original Broadway cast of My Fair Lady.)
There's nothing sexual going on here (in fact Philip's affect reminds me of a non-comedic Paul Lynde). Rather, Philip keeps trying to get Liz to study ballet, read the classics, and learn French--all the things he forced his daughter to do once his wife passed away. Eventually Liz discovers Melisande's diary, which reveals that, driven to despair by her father's controlling and increasingly violent ways (including locking her in her room), the girl committed suicide. Philip becomes more and more brittle, erratic, and violent because Liz refuses to pretend to be Melisande and keeps trying to escape. Back in the outside world, Liz's friends finally begin to put it together that she isn't in Paris, but, satisfyingly, Liz manages to rescue herself by forcing Philip to read his daughter's diary. This makes him unravel completely, whereupon she takes the room key from him and is just opening the front door of the mansion when her friends show up to save her.
When she and her friends go back up to Melisande's room, Philip is wandering in and out of reality, recounting favorite anecdotes about his daughter's precocity, and going incandescent with pain as he faces up to her death. Soap opera performances often resemble live theater more than film or weekly TV shows, because the actors usually only get one chance to do the scene. Purdum's performance here is electrifying in its pathos, though to the end, Philip never becomes an iota more likeable (and I like that about this storyline).
There's a different kind of pathos in realizing that Purdum probably never expected his very good performances on The Doctors to see the light of day after they aired the first time. I looked him up online. He has a handful of TV and film credits. According to his New York Times obituary, he "appeared as Bud Frump in the Broadway production of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and in the original productions of Irwin Shaw's Children From Their Games in 1963 and the Lorraine Hansberry play Les Blancs in 1970." He died of pancreatic cancer at the age of sixty-three. I am glad to have encountered him on The Doctors.
Also, his wife was named...Melisande! (She was in the original Broadway cast of My Fair Lady.)
