THE MOTHER OF ALL...

While Days of Our Lives tries to figure out EJ's (a.k.a. Elvis') parentage puzzle, we take a look back at his presumptive mother, Susan Banks, as played by Eileen Davidson (now Ashley on Y&R).

Eileen Davidson: Tom Langan, who was the Co-Executive Producer at the time, told me they were going to try to get somebody to play the part of Susan. I suggested that I play it. She was supposed to be really different from Kristen. (Headwriter) James Reilly put in the Elvis stuff. He created the rough sketch, and I filled it in. We added a padded suit, false teeth, contact lenses, and we tried out some wigs. But, I created her personality. I had a lot of input. Susan was supposed to be insecure, from a small town, not very worldly, basically kind of ignorant. She had an innocence. I based a lot of it on innocence, not necessarily ignorance. But, she was very intelligent in a certain way. She was good at getting what she wanted. (At first), they only had Susan in mind, and they really didn’t know for how long. James just kind of took off. He’s brilliant. The whole story was brilliant, with the teeth falling out at the wedding (below), all those things he wrote were so funny. He took inspiration from me, I took inspiration from him.

Read more from Eileen, as well as dozens of other actors, writers, producers, experts and fans in Soap Opera 451: A Time Capsule of Daytime Drama's Greatest Moments, available on Amazon and BN.com.

Meanwhile, enjoy those infamous flying teeth, below!