Who Does Susan Lucci Keep in Touch With From ‘All My Children’?

All My Children went off the air in 2011, but the bonds that Susan Lucci, who played the iconic Erica Kane, forged during her decades in Pine Valley remain firmly in place.

In addition to a handful of behind-the-scenes colleagues, Lucci is still closely connected to her former costars, including Cameron Mathison (General Hospital‘s Drew Cain, who played Ryan Lavery), Eva LaRue (Maria Santos), Eden Riegel (Bianca Montgomery), Alicia Minshew (Kendall Hart), and Jill Larson (Opal Cortlandt). “We all stay in touch somehow or another,” Lucci says. “Sometimes we get to see each other, but mostly we just stay in touch via text or Instagram.”

Lucci’s 41-year run on the show was filled with memorable moments, but none looms larger than her Daytime Emmy win in 1999 after 19 nominations. Before revealing the winner, presenter Shemar Moore (who played Malcolm Winters on The Young and the Restless) declared, “The streak is over.”

The announcement quickly entered daytime television lore, but for Lucci, it played out in an unexpected way. “Shemar Moore is so adorable,” she notes. “We were in Madison Square Garden that year — we were usually at Radio City — but that particular year we were in the Garden, and I thought he was announcing the sports playoff scores. I thought, ‘Oh, that’s nice. He’s gonna keep everybody in the loop.’ So, I was surprised when [my win] turned out to be the announcement that he made.”

Finally holding the coveted trophy was deeply meaningful. “Winning is better,” she says candidly. “I make no secret of that. I was really happy to be nominated all those times and, of course, you can’t win if you’re not in the game, so I was very happy that my peers in the industry thought my work was worthy to keep me in the game. That was great, but winning was just amazing.”

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What became clear in the days that followed was just how much the victory really resonated with the public. “I would walk into a restaurant, and the restaurant would not only send over champagne, but the staff would come and sing, ‘Congratulations to you,’ to the tune of ‘Happy Birthday,’” she recalls. “I was so touched. I remember being stopped at a red light on the way home after work one day shortly after I won, and a big New York City fire truck pulled up next to us at the red light, and on top, sitting outside, were a bunch of firemen. I don’t know how they saw me, but they leaned down, and they all gave me a thumbs up. Some wonderful things like that. I mean, certainly, my husband and our family cared, but that the press corps would be so engaged and that people in general would care so much and would be jumping up and down for me, that was amazing, and I’ll never forget that.”

Looking back on more than four decades in Pine Valley, Lucci is filled with gratitude. “I loved it, and I continue to love it,” she says. “I remember walking into the studio one morning, and we had been on the air for 25 years. I remember thinking, ‘Has anyone noticed how long we’ve been here? Aren’t we lucky? Isn’t this fabulous?’ I miss that. I miss being part of that team, and it was a great team, people all on the same page. We just wanted the scenes to work and to put on a good show, and it was wonderful.”

Everett Collection

That she remained with the series for the entirety of its run still amazes her. “First of all, I had to be convinced to sign my first contract because it was for three years,” she muses. “I was just out of college, so my only frame of reference was four years of college, and now they wanted me there for three years? It was a lifetime to me at the time, but what I did realize was how wonderful the part was and how wonderful the writing was.”

She admits she periodically checked in with herself about whether she wanted to remain on the show. “As time went by, I would reevaluate every time my contract would come up, ‘Do I want to stay? Am I happy?’” she shares. “But the truth is, I would walk in in the morning, and my inside voice was singing. I was happy. I was happy with the material, I was happy with who I was working with, happy who I was working for, and it allowed me to stay in New York and raise my children. I was as happy as I could be.”

Perhaps the biggest surprise of all was the audience’s reaction to Erica Kane herself. “I didn’t know the fans were going to love Erica because she was the bad girl in town, but they did,” she marvels. “What I loved is that the audience saw her spirit more than anything, and that’s what they loved. I was so surprised early on that I was being asked to give interviews for women’s magazines as a standard of feminism. That shocked me because Erica really just wanted boyfriends and men, so I didn’t see what the audience saw, which was that she was determined to have what she wanted in life. I guess I didn’t know that that was such a new thing. To me, that just seemed normal.”

For more from Lucci, pick up a copy of her new memoir, La Lucci, on sale February 3.