My thoughts, though, turned to one actor's perspective of working with Ms. Phelps. See what Tina Sloan (Lillian, GL) had to say about her former boss and the revolutionary storyline they brought to television in 1992:
I was called into my producer’s office and asked if I wanted
to do a breast cancer storyline. This was the first time it was
done. Of course, my first question was, “Will I make it?" I
remember thinking that, in real life, I would ask that question if a doctor
told me I had breast cancer. But, in
real life, he could not say as my producer, Jill Farren Phelps, did, “Yes,
you will survive.” One of our producers, Kathy Chambers, had recently
died of breast cancer – far too young, in her early 30s – and we wanted to do
this to alert women to self-examination and mammograms.
As a nurse, Lillian was the character who would
do a self-exam, so my character came out from the shower one evening,
did a self-exam and discovered the lump.
Terrified, Lillian went to her doctor at the
hospital. She examined her and
said, “Yes, there is something there.”
She gave Lillian a mammogram; the first time ever on TV – we showed
women what it was like.
Read more from Tina, as well as GL's Jill Lorie Hurst (writer of the ground-breaking Otalia story), and many more of the actors, writers and producers who created the moments you voted best of all time in Soap Opera 451: A Time Capsule of Daytime Drama's Moments, available on Amazon and B&N.
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