As the World Turns star Eileen Fulton dead at 91: Actress played iconic ‘bad girl’ for half a century

As the World Turns star Eileen Fulton, who acted on the legendary soap opera on and off for half a century, has died at the age of 91.

She won the hearts of fans as the scenery-chewing ‘bad girl’ Lisa Grimaldi, a role she originated in 1960 and played for the final time on the show’s last episode in 2010.

Fulton has revealed that although Lisa was conceived as a ‘sweet girl next door,’ she felt the character was insufficiently interesting and so she delivered her lines in a ‘conniving’ fashion that prompted the writers to change course and make her sinister.

Over the decades her character grew from a young ‘vixen’ – whom Time magazine once branded a ‘superb****’ – into a gentler grande dame.

At one point during the show, Fulton famously had a ‘grandma clause’ installed in her contract that would prevent Lisa from having grandchildren, for fear that she would be written off the show if her character were seen as old and irrelevant.

She died July 14 in her hometown of Ashville, North Carolina ‘after a period of declining health,’ according to an obituary from the local Groce Funeral Home.

As the World Turns star Eileen Fulton, who acted on the legendary soap opera on and off for half a century, has died at the age of 91; pictured in 2011

She won the hearts of fans as the scenery-chewing ‘bad girl’ Lisa Grimaldi, who is pictured with her first husband Bob Hughes (Don Hastings) in 1962

Although she was born in Asheville in 1933, she had a peripatetic childhood as a result of her father’s vocation as a Methodist minister. 

She had the performing bug from the age of two, when she cut into one of her father’s services by singing the old folk song Shortnin’ Bread and braved the resultant spanking, she told the Washington Post.

Fulton majored in music at Greensboro College and her father got her a job in a church choir, but she was determined to move to New York City, harboring dreams ‘of being the greatest actress on Broadway.’

After studying under the seminal acting teachers Sanford Meisner and Lee Strasberg, as well as modern dance pioneer Martha Graham, she embarked on a showbiz career that finally took off in 1960 when she was cast on As the World Turns.

Over the next 50 years, she repeatedly left the show – ‘I’ve quit forever three times,’ she once drily remarked – but always wound up coming back.

In the early years of the show, Fulton worked tirelessly to juggle the soap and the New York stage, acting in such shows as The Fantasticks and as a replacement in the original Broadway production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.

But her most enduring role, the one that cemented her position in showbiz history, was as the stylish and ruthlessly conniving Lisa on As the World Turns.

She cycled through a dizzying succession of what eventually turned out to be eight husbands, remaining herself a consistently tantalizing presence on the show.

Fulton is pictured in character as LIsa, standing behind the central sofa, in a cast photo for the long-running CBS soap opera taken in 1962

Fulton was the one who changed the character from the ‘sweet girl’ she was originally conceived as into the scenery-chewing villainess she became.

Since the show was filmed live, she felt she could not ‘change her lines’ but she could ‘change my intentions once we were on the air,’ she told the Television Academy.

During the live broadcasts, she said her dialogue as written but added ‘little conniving things’ she could do to her character’s first husband Bob Hughes (Don Hastings).

Producer and head writer Irna Phillips was impressed with Fulton’s agility, saying: ‘Why, look at that – that little rascal can play a b****!’

Lisa became the character fans loved to hate, so much so that she briefly got a spin-off called Our Private World for a few months of 1965. 

During her on-and-off run on the show, Fulton also achieved a certain degree of notoriety over the ‘grandma clause’ she had added to her contract in the 1970s.

One of her co-stars Barbara Berjer had recently gotten killed off the show after the producers realized her character had become a great-grandmother.

Fulton resolved: ‘That’s not gonna happen to me,’ and so when her character’s son was aged up and given romantic storylines, she had her contract amended to include the stipulation that Lisa would not be made a grandmother.

News of the ‘grandma clause’ made its way into the media, and at one point became a major source of controversy for Fulton when her character’s daughter-in-law had a miscarriage on the show in the 1980s. 

By that point the ‘grandma clause’ was no longer in Fulton’s contract – but viewers who were unaware of the change thought the miscarriage storyline was her fault.

‘In fact,’ she recalled later: ‘I got such threatening mail saying: “It’s because of you and your conceit, that you should have a ‘grandma clause.’ You are a baby killer, and we’re coming to get you.” I had letters like that from all over the country.’

Fulton’s ‘very cute driver,’ who was moonlighting as a bodyguard, suggested that she needed a bit of extra protection and so he acted as her security as well.