Kassie DePaiva Reflects on ‘One Life to Live’s Cancellation & Todd and Blair’s Ending (Exclusive)
Kassie DePaiva was already known to soap audiences as Guiding Light‘s Chelsea Reardon when the opportunity to play Blair Cramer on One Life to Live came her way in 1993. “I had left Guiding Light in ’91, gone out to Los Angeles to try to make my way and maybe do some nighttime stuff,” she recalls. “In that time period, I had auditioned and screen-tested for a part on Another World — I think it was a character named Amanda — but I didn’t get it. And then this audition for Blair came up and I thought, ‘Oh, wow, this would be great. Do I want to move back to New York?’ Yes, I wanted to, because I was not in a good place in my personal life with a marriage and I just wanted to work.”
At the time she auditioned for the show, DePaiva was unaware that the show was taking the character in a different direction from her predecessor, Mia Korf. “I had no idea it was controversial until after I’d had a couple of callbacks,” she explains. “Someone said, ‘You know you’re replacing an Asian American actress.’ And I’m like, ‘What?’ I didn’t even think I would be considered, but three auditions later, I’m packing my bags and moving to New York and playing this character called Blair and it changed my life.”
Because her contract cycle was up every 13 weeks, DePaiva kept her apartment in Los Angeles just in case. “I needed a backup plan,” she notes. “But after that 13-week cycle, I felt pretty solid and good. One Life to Live felt like home to me.”
Heidi Gutman / ©ABC / courtesy Everett Collection
Cancellation “Was a Gut Punch”
Looking back, DePaiva says her two decades on the show, which originally premiered on July 15, 1968, were filled with countless highlights. “I loved the whole umbrella of doing soap operas,” she offers. “I loved the pace. I loved the challenge of doing it. I was able to overcome fears and anxieties, like doing that live week [in May 2002] was something that I thought I was too much of a nervous Nellie to do. I went up to Gary Tomlin [executive producer at the time] and said, ‘I don’t want to do it. I’m going to go on vacation that week. This is too much.’ And I probably did my best work under that pressure. Yes, One Life to Live was pretty special.”
So, when the soap was canceled in April 2011, “it was a gut punch,” DePaiva sighs. “We were brought onto the stage of The View, and it was One Life to Live and All My Children, we were fully expecting for them to make the announcement that All My Children was being canceled, but then they did both and it was just awful. And then we had to go back on set and work, and I just remember going down to my dressing room and calling my mom. It was really sad, and it was just so bizarre that it was canceled. It was doing so well, and our numbers were really good. I just didn’t understand it and I missed it. I had to mourn. It took me two years to get over that, to grieve that loss.”
Heidi Gutman / © ABC / Courtesy Everett Collection
Blair and Todd’s Split: “The Most Heartbreaking Thing I’ve Ever Done”
Though Blair was also paired on-screen with Max Holden, played by her real-life husband James DePaiva, it was her tumultuous romance with Todd Manning that became her most memorable. “Blair was addicted to Max and obsessed with him, but she fell in love with Todd,” explains DePaiva. “And Todd understood her. I still shake my head how that worked, but there was something really magical between Todd and Blair that I was like, ‘OK, I don’t really get this, but fans like it.’ I was just picking up scripts and keeping the story going, but if you go back and watch some Todd and Blair stuff on YouTube, it’s really well written and it’s complicated, so it’s not just fluffy stuff. These people were really trying to figure out their relationship, their dark, broken pasts and now I get it.”
After the final episode of OLTL aired on January 13, 2012, DePaiva reprised the role of Blair a couple of months later to help facilitate Todd Manning’s crossover to General Hospital. “I was just a lucky, lucky girl to walk into that part and I feel like I made it my own,” she says. “And it was something that I protected. So, when One Life to Live ended and they took me to General Hospital for those three or four days to break Todd and Blair up so Todd could be with Carly [Spencer, Laura Wright], it was the most heartbreaking thing I’ve ever done. That’s how emotionally attached I was to it, because I felt I’d worked 20 years to build this brand, and you’re gonna give me three days to be pissed off at Todd, and that’s gonna be it? That would never ever happen. Not in a million years. So that was hard. And then when they rebooted the show with Prospect Park [in 2013], that, in and of itself, could have been much better, but it just happened very fast and they weren’t ready. That’s all.”
As she looks back now on her OLTL experience, it is with a deep appreciation and a full heart. “It was amazing,” she says. “I’m grateful. I don’t have a one little speck of regret whatsoever. It was wonderful. I met lifelong friends from Tuc Watkins [David Vickers] to Nathan Fillion [Joey Buchanan], to Robin Strasser and Kristen Alderson — these are people that are in my life. I got to see Bobby Woods [Bo Buchanan] at Eddie Alderson‘s [Matthew Buchanan] wedding, and it was just wonderful. So, it’s all positive.”
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