People Magazine
September 16, 1996
Her Life to Live
By: Karen S. Schneider
Cynthia Wang in New York City
Soap Star Erika
Slezak's real prime time is saved for her family
Lined up neatly on
the shelf of a Welsh dresser in the living room of the house Erika Slezak
shares with her husband, two children, three dogs and a cat are five Emmy
awards collecting dust. “Look at this,” says Slezak dismissively, picking
up one for examination. “Detachable nameplates for the base. This one
actually has double-stick tape on it.”
Easy for her to scoff. In the passionate love affair between soap-opera
fans and their divas. Slezak, 50-who has spent half her life playing
newspaper magnate Victoria Lord Riley Burke Rile Buchanan Buchanan
Carpenter on ABC's One Life to Live-is the Other Woman. Year after year,
at Emmy time, all eyes turn to Susan Lucci, star of ABC's All My Children
and a 16-time best actress nominee. And year after year it is Slezak who
quietly takes the statue back to her nine-bedroom, Tudor-style estate on
New York's Long Island. A little too quietly for her producer Robyn
Goodman, who feels that Slezak's unprecedented fifth daytime Emmy, awarded
last May, “was obscured by everyone feeling badly for Susan. I understand
that, but you don't want to neglect the person who was rewarded.”
Not that Slezak feels neglected. Fanfare is less important to her than
respect (she gets plenty, even from Lucci, who calls her a “witty woman
and a spectacular actress”). And right up there with respect is the allure
of a steady job, a stable family life and being able to hop into the Jeep
Cherokee she parks next door to ABC's Manhattan studio in time to be home
for dinner. “I hate, hate staying late,” she says. Especially now, with
even more to look forward to than a cozy supper with her husband of 18
years, actor Brian Davies, and their children Michael 16, and Amanda 14.
On September 9, Slezak makes her first prime-time appearance, as private
secretary Jean Roberts in the NBC-TV movie Danielle Steel's Full Circle.
“It was terrific fun,” says Slezak of last spring's two-week shoot. 'The
kids thought it was cool because I had my own trailer.”
Despite the star treatment, Slezak never imagined herself as a Danielle
Steel kind of gal. The second of three children of the late Vienna-born
actor Walter Slezak and his homemaker wife, Johanna, Erika was born in
Hollywood, moved to New York City in 1954, when her father landed a part
in the Broadway musical Fanny (for which he won a best actor Tony), and
was educated at a series of public and parochial schools. “I was an
obnoxiously responsible kid,” says Slezak, who shunned sports, skipped
eighth grade and was such a goody-two shoes that she chaperoned dates for
her older sister Ingrid, now 51 an attorney in Portland, Oregon. Says
Slezak with a laugh: “I was a terrible tattletale.”
But a snitch devoted to acting. Dave for “about 20 minutes when I
wanted to be a nun,” says Slezak, “it never occurred to me to do anything
else.” After honing her skills in high school plays at the Convent of the
Sacred Heart in Greenwich, Connecticut, Slezak was accepted at London's
Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. “I wanted to be a serious actress in the
worst possible way,” she says. Later, for $108 a week, she strutted her
stuff in Euripides and Shakespeare for the Milwaukee Repertory Theater.
One role she'd just as soon forget: In 1968, at 21, she took on the
real-life role of a bride. “He was a nice man,” says Slezak of her first
husband, but the marriage lasted only three years. “We had totally
different ambitions,” she says. She left Milwaukee in 1969, and in 1971
was in Buffalo playing Desdemona in Othello, when she got a call saying an
earlier audition for OLTL had earned her a regular gig. “I had never done
TV,” Slezak recalls. “God bless certain people who literally took me by
the hand and led me through that first day.”
For years now it has been Slezak doing the hand-holding. When an
anxious Robin Stasser took on the role of Slezak's arch-nemesis Dorian
Lord in 1979, she recalls that “Erika came quietly over and said, “I just
want you to know you are going to be very good in this part.” Says L.A.
Law's Blair Underwood about his three-month stint as an unknown in 1985:
“She took me under her wing. To this day she like a proud mother.”
If a somewhat baffled one. During their lively dinnertime
conversations, Slezak goes head-to-head with her son about politics. “He
is an absolute right-wing conservative,” she laughs. “I don't know where
that came from.” And she has mixed feelings about Amanda's desire to
follow in her mother's footsteps. “Don't do it because you think you want
to be famous,” Slezak tells her daughter. “Just do it because you love to
act. Then the fame doesn't matter.”
