Before ‘Full House,’ Lori Loughlin Was a Teen Soap Star
Years before Lori Loughlin became a household name on Full House playing Uncle Jesse’s gal, Rebecca “Becky” Donaldson Katsopolis, she was already all over the small screen — as the teen star of ABC’s The Edge of Night. Throughout the ’80s, daytime dramas were eager to add younger faces to their casts to attract teens and young twenty-somethings. With just a few minor roles under her belt, the fresh-faced, 15-year-old Loughlin signed on to The Edge of Night in June 1980, playing troubled aspiring teen dancer Jody Travis, younger sister of the much-married Nicole Travis Stewart Drake Cavanaugh (Maeve McGuire, Jayne Bentzen, Lisa Sloan) ,who’d matured out of her own wild youth.
So how did Loughlin make her way from the bright lights of child modeling to the Perry Mason-inspired, crime-centered The Edge of Night? It required a bit of luck … and a few white lies.
Loughlin Forgot to Lie About Her Age …
© ABC / Courtesy: Everett Collection
Intent on being an actress, the native New Yorker convinced her mom to let her try modeling as a preteen, which led to a few TV commercials. Just shy of her 16th birthday, Loughlin’s handlers dispatched her to audition for The Edge of Night, even though her sparse acting credentials seemed to make her a poor fit for the rigors of filming a daytime drama.
“When I went on the audition, first of all they said [to] lie about your age,” Loughlin told Salon in 2018. “I forgot to lie about my age, and the casting director almost let me walk out the door.”
Still, that director had a feeling about Loughlin, and brought her back to audition with another young actor before the drama’s Proctor & Gamble producers. “His name was Todd. I don’t know his last name,” Loughlin recalled. “Right before he walked through the door, he said to me, ‘You know, every time I read with an actress for a soap opera, she gets the role and I don’t.’”
The young man was correct. But Loughlin had one more hurdle to leap. Or maybe jeté.
… But Did Remember to Lie About Dancing
Dorothy Tanous / TV Guide / courtesy Everett Collection
Loughlin told Salon that, while it was never specifically mentioned before her audition, Jody Travis was an aspiring dancer, setting up her romance with professional dancer-turned-rebel Gavin Wylie (Mark Arnold). But Loughlin didn’t dance. “I lied and said I could dance … then I got there and they had a full blown dance studio,” Loughlin recalled. “And a choreographer.”
Loughlin got lucky again. She confessed her lacking dance skills, so, to keep her in the role, the writers gave the character a broken foot, ending her dance career and finding other ways for Jody to get herself into a pickle. Said pickles included ill-fated romances, a purloined portrait, sexual harassment by her lecherous boss Eliot Dorn (Lee Goddart) who wound up murdered, and a terrifying kidnapping while she was investigating yet another murder.
Those infamous Clown Puppet Murders
With her dance career kiboshed, Jody realized that solving mysteries didn’t really pay, and snagged a job as a waitress at a night club called The Unicorn. There, she endured Eliot’s icky advances, and made a friend of rich boy puppeteer Kelly McGrath (Christopher Atkins lookalike Allen Fawcett, who was 33 to Loughlin’s 16).
Kelly puts on puppet shows at The Unicorn, but when the dolls seem to take up a murderous life of their own in a 1980 storyline called “the Clown Puppet Murders,” their master seems a leeeeettle suspicious, setting in motion a nightmare-inducing murder mystery.
But there’s another club in town, this one featuring dancing to the latest music videos. There, Jody falls victim to subliminal manipulation by smarmy club manager (and Scotch whiskey fan) Robbie Hamlin (Willie Aames), who finds a creative use for the newfangled cable TV to get the residents of Monticello to do his bidding.
Hamlin’s efforts were foiled by the mysterious bad boy Preacher Emerson (Charles Grant), who also sometimes solves crimes and and sometimes works at the video club. A vamped Jody partners up with him to solve murders and enjoy a bit of canoodling, much to the distress of her former lover Gavin.
Loughlin goes off ‘The Edge’ and off to Hollywood
Actress Karrie Emerson took over the role of Jody Travis in 1984, which marked Edge of Night‘s final season. Loughlin, now 61, headed for Hollywood to make a run of teen movies — including Secret Admirer with C. Thomas Howell and Kelly Preston, the BMX flick Rad, and the Night Before with Keanu Reeves — before she took up residence on Full House, playing Becky from 1988 to 1995 and becoming a household name in the process.
Now a Hallmark Channel staple, Loughlin recently played foul mouthed, tough cookie Lieutenant Bishop in Amazon Prime’s cop procedural, On Call, which only survived a season. She credits her time on The Edge of Night for her ability to rebound from setbacks and to be grateful for whatever good roles come her way, citing Edge of Night star Larkin Malloy‘s horrific 1982 accident as an example of Hollywood’s fickle nature.
© ABC /Courtesy Everett Collection
Malloy, then 27, was run down by a cab as he crossed Park Avenue, and failed to appear on set the next day. “No one knew where he was,” said Loughlin, who was convicted of a 2020 college admissions scandal with husband Mossimo Giannulli, whom she’s now divorcing. “Finally, they located him in the hospital. He was in critical condition. That happened on a Thursday. On Friday they were, because it’s a daytime soap, auditioning another actor [James Horan] to replace him.”
But most of all, she learned how to act, and how to treat her coworkers, especially the newbies.
“I was so green,” Loughlin remembers of her time on The Edge of Night. “I really didn’t know what I was doing, and I was really fortunate to work with a group of actors who really were theater actors. … They were either in a Broadway [or] off-Broadway show, so everyone was so nice. They took me under their wing and they really helped me because I was total deer in the headlights. I had no idea.”
Were you a fan of The Edge of Night? What were your favorite Jody Travis storylines? Tell us in the comments below.
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