Kassie DePaiva Details Meeting Her Husband on ‘One Life to Live’ Set (Exclusive)

Kassie DePaiva was already a familiar face to soap viewers when she took on the part of Blair Cramer on One Life to Live; she’d previously made a name for herself as Guiding Light‘s Chelsea Reardon. But as soon as she set foot on the OLTL set, she says she instantly connected to her new role. “I was 33 at the time and that character was not me,” she recalls. “I mean, I was tough and feisty, but I was all about being sweet and nice and making sure everybody liked me. Well, Blair didn’t give a poot. So, I was really able to own the power of being female. She was a very sexual, manipulative person, but she was smart and broken and lonely and hungry and determined, so it was a great character.
“I feel like I understood her from the beginning,” DePaiva continues. “I felt that she was very Scarlett O’Hara at the time — that’s kind of what I based it on — that feisty, fiddle-dee-dee type of character. I had the wonderful Cramer women to work with. Robin Strasser [Dorian Lord] was amazing, and we had a strong bond and still do, and they brought in Starr [Manning, Kristen Alderson] and we watched her grow up and build that family unit. And then the history of Addie [Cramer, Pamela Payton-Wright] with her mental illness gave us so much to pull from.”
Her OLTL run began at a time when the genre was still riding high in mainstream popularity. “It was huge,” she relays. “The internet has changed everything now, but the only access people had to the actors was when they did appearances, so I remember going on appearances and 5,000 people would show up at a shopping mall. That’s something that I don’t think the generation now can even conceptualize. You had all the magazines and people would line up and bring magazines for you to sign.”
Love on set
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One of DePaiva’s first scene partners was James DePaiva (Max Holden), who would become her husband in 1996. “I had met Jimmy a long time ago at a bar [in New York City] when I was singing, back when I was on Guiding Light, but I had not met him on the set of One Life to Live,” she shares. “And so, I’m in the makeup chair and he comes in and Birkenstocks, socks and a brown terry cloth robe and I thought, ‘Okay,’ and the rest is pretty much history.”
The DePaivas were one of several couples who met on the show. “One Life to Live must have had some love fairy dust in it because there were so many people that ended up getting married while we were there,” she reflects. “There was Kamar [de los Reyes, Antonio Vega] and Sherri [Saum, Keri Reynolds], and Thorsten [Kaye, Patrick Thornhart] and Susan [Haskell, Marty Saybrooke] and David [Fumero, Christian Vega] and Melissa [Fumero, Adriana Cramer]. It was a little magical place.”

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July/August 2025
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