10 Soap Crossovers We'll Never Forget!
No. 10: Starr Manning, Cole and Hope Thornhart from One Life to Live to General Hospital
Starr X’d lovers Starr Manning (Kristen Alderson) and Cole Thornhart (Van Hughes) appeared to be finally ready for that whole happily ever after thing as of One Life to Live’s series finale on Jan. 13, 2012. Following a multi-character prison break and Cole almost dying at the hands of an obsessed coed, the teen parents were reunited in L.A. with their daughter Hope and best pals Markko (Jason Tam) and Langston (Brittany Underwood).
Flash forward to this past week and the young Manning-Thornharts lives took a deadly turn, while driving through the seemingly sleepy town of Port Charles, New York. As Cole jokingly filled Starr in on P.C.’s infamous history (madmen trying to freeze the world; that other Starr X’d pairing, Luke and Laura), the Llanview lovers and their daughter found themselves involved in a lethal car accident, courtesy of resident warring mobsters Anthony Zacchara (Bruce Weitz) and (possibly) Sonny Corinthos (Maurice Benard).
OLTL viewers who followed their faves to General Hospital likely watched in horror as (SPOILER ALERT) Cole and Hope, trapped in the wrecked car, went over the side of a cliff to a presumed fiery demise. Here’s hoping the prospects of unlucky in love Corinthos scion Michael (Chad Duell) helping heal Starr’s broken heart; and a war of epic proportions kicking off between Starr’s own volatile father Todd Manning (Roger Howarth) and Sonny, will be enough to make losing Hope and Cole worth it.
No. 9. Amber Moore and Deacon Sharpe from The Bold and the Beautiful to The Young and the Restless
Daytime’s oldest teenage vixen, Amber Moore (Adrienne Frantz) had pretty much deflowered every young adult Forrester male by the year 2006, which left her little to do in SoCal on The Bold and the Beautiful. What better time for Amber, following a webisoap bridge storyline with As The World Turn’s Allison Stewart, to relocate to Genoa City, Wisconsin on B&B’s sister sudser The Young and the Restless?
It wasn’t long before Amber was up to her old tricks, drugging men and tricking them into fake weddings; getting married men addicted to porn. Lucky for Amber, the friendship of G.C. society maven Katherine Chancellor (Jeanne Cooper) and the love of Daniel Romalotti (Michael Graziadei)—the dude she got hooked on porn—saw the perennial schemer starting to turn over a new leaf.
Amber’s redemption was short-lived, however. The Bold and the Beautiful’s dangerously sexy Deacon Sharpe (Sean Kanan), her former partner in crime, followed her to Genoa City and promptly got Amber and Daniel mixed up in an illegal art forgery ring. When Daniel was charged with a murder he didn’t commit, Amber agreed to sleep with Deacon to free the man she loved. Of course that wasn’t enough for Deacon, who ended up blackmailing Amber into marriage! Eventually, with the help of Daniel’s mother Phyllis (Michelle Stafford), the couple managed to turn the tables on Deacon and get married. Later, when Amber expressed a desire to find Little Eric—Deacon’s son with her late cousin Becky, whom Amber once raised as her own with B&B’s Rick Forrester (Jacob Young)—Daniel freaked out, not yet ready for kids.
Amber left Genoa City and Daniel, ultimately ending up back where it all began for her — Los Angeles. Meanwhile, Deacon continues to skulk around Genoa City from time to time, mostly causing trouble for fellow recovering drunk Nikki Newman (Melody Thomas Scott).
Photo of Sean Kanan by PR Photos
No. 8. Ashley Abbott from The Young and the Restless to The Bold and the Beautiful
When Genoa City cosmetics heiress Ashley Abbott (Eileen Davidson) grew sick of her scheming, smilin’ big brother Jack’s (Peter Bergman) dirty plots to regain control of their family business, she decided it was time for a change of scenery. After meeting The Bold and the Beautiful’s Rick Forrester (Kyle Lowder) in France, Ash managed to get her groove back, courtesy of the strapping, much younger fashion exec.
Imagine Rick’s surprise when the older beauty he bedded in Paris, turned up in L.A. to work for his family’s fashion house! Since Rick was busy romancing one of his step-nieces, Phoebe Forrester (MacKenzie Mauzy), he and Ash decided to leave their torrid affair in the past. She then took up with Rick’s stepbrother Ridge (Ron Moss), quickly becoming engaged. After Ridge’s ex (and Rick’s mom) Brooke Logan (Katherine Kelly Lang) was raped, Ridge reached out to her. A brief triangle triangle ensued, with Ridge and Brooke reuniting in the end. Meanwhile, Brooke’s unstable brother Storm (William de Vry) became interested in Ashley.
When Ridge warned Ashley to stay away from Storm—due to the fact that he had busted a cap in malevolent Forrester matriarch Stephanie (Susan Flannery)—the cuckoo Logan showed up at Ash’s crib with a gun! Storm insisted he wasn't going to hurt anyone with the piece. Tell that to his kid sister Katie (played by Heather Tom, who portrayed Ashley’s stepdaughter/rival Victoria on Y&R), who suffered a near fatal shot to the chest when she tried to get the weapon away from her brother.
To save his sister’s life (Katie would have died without a new heart), Stormy shot himself—not to mention Ash’s last attempt at a love life in L.A.—right in the head. Shaken, but not stirred, our Ms. Abbott decided to pack up her daughter Abby and move back to Europe to work for Forrester International. It wasn’t too long before Ashley Abbott returned to Genoa City where she belonged.
No. 7. Bianca Montgomery, Babe Carey, Kelly Cramer, Paul Cramer et al All My Children/One Life to Live Baby Switch
Erica Kane’s (Susan Lucci) lesbian daughter Bianca Montgomery (Eden Riegel) on All My Children just might have been the most long-suffering heroine in the history of soap operas — and that’s saying something! After enduring a gut wrenching coming out process, having her first gal pal murdered and her second turn out to be a con woman, Bianca was brutally raped by the vile Michael Cambias (William deVry). A survivor like her mother, Bianca decided to carry the child to term and raise her baby in love.
What Binks didn’t bank on was that One Life to Live’s Paul Cramer (David Tom), the skeevy ex-husband of her best friend Babe Carey (Alexa Havins), would stage a helicopter accident while “rescuing” the new mothers, in order to steal Babe’s newborn son to give him to his sister Kelly (Heather Tom) back in Llanview. Nasty Paul then gave Bianca’s daughter to Babe, and ramped up the horror by letting Ms. Montgomery believe her baby had died in the crash!
Paul’s neurotic sister had promised she’d held him get the $30 million he was angling for from their late Aunt Betsy’s estate, if he helped Kelly find a baby to replace the stillborn child she’d born Buchanan heir Kevin (Dan Gauthier).
Eventually Bianca learned the truth about the baby switch, and the fact that her pal Babe had known the truth since months earlier and had kept quiet. Binks risked it all to get her daughter—by this time going by the name Bess Chandler—back from childhood friend JR (Jacob Young), even falling off a balcony and almost dying!
Enter Bianca’s unstoppable mother, Erica Kane, who with the help of family friend Tad Martin (Michael E. Knight) took on JR and Adam Chandler (David Canary)—one of Erica's many ex-husbands—to regain Bianca’s daughter Miranda for the Family Kane. The scenes where a near death Binks was reunited with her little girl were some of the last great moments for All My Children, and cemented Bianca Montgomery’s place among Pine Valley’s most beloved heroines.
Oh, and that nasty Babe got her baby back from the Buchanans too, and spent the next few years fighting JR for custody of the boy she named Lil Adam. Then, one day, a great, big ol’ CGI tornado caused her to be impaled like the bitch kabob she was. That’ll teach her to steal from a Kane!
No. 6. Anna Devane and Robin Scorpio from General Hospital to All My Children
General Hospital fans had waited for years for presumed dead superspy Anna Devane (Finola Hughes) to reunite with her beloved daughter Robin Scorpio (Kimberly McCullough). What they likely weren’t expecting was for that reunion to take place in All My Children’s Pine Valley, Pennsylvania, as opposed to Port Charles, New York.
Anna’s never-before-heard of identical twin sister, Alexandra Marick (also played by Hughes) found her sibling alive and very well in 2001, almost a decade after Anna and her ex-husband Robert (Tristan Rogers) were thought to have been killed in an explosion. The amnesiac came to Pine Valley and became almost immediately entrenched in the lives of Alex’s family by marriage, the Andrassy-Maricks. Unfortunately for Princess Gillian Andrassy (Esta TerBlanche), a hit man sent to dispose of Anna, ended up killing the royal instead!
Anna bonded with Gillian’s widower Ryan Lavery (Cameron Mathison), a distant cousin of Anna’s own late husband Duke (Ian Buchanan) and eventually discovered a nephew, Aiden (Aidan Turner), but it was Anna’s long-awaited family reunion with Robin in 2001 that moved fans to tears of joy.
Anna ultimately went on to find a complicated and erotic love in Pine Valley, falling for diabolical Dr. David Hayward (Vincent Irizarry). Anna had been tasked with investigating Hayward by the Feds. The pair got married to keep Anna from having to testify against David, but their love was all too real. Before long, Anna helped prove David wasn’t notorious drug pusher Proteus, his mother was!
Anna’s love for David was constantly tested, like the time she learned he’d been keeping a presumed dead Maria Santos Grey (Eva La Rue) away from her family for years, but ultimately the couple delivered a baby daughter, Leora, named for David’s late brother Leo (Josh Duhamel). When Leora died and Anna later learned David was back to his old tricks, she decided to leave him and Pine Valley for good.
No. 5. Skye Chandler and Rae Cummings from All My Children and One Life to Live to the entire ABC Daytime Lineup
Pine Valley mogul Adam Chandler’s (David Canary) hellcat daughter Antoinette Skye Chandler was used to dealing with ruthless patriarchs by the time the All My Children character crossed over to One Life to Live in 1999 to help Asa Buchanan (the late Phil Carey) take down Syke’s husband Ben Davidson (Mark Derwin). Unbeknownst to Viki Lord’s (Erika Slezak) new beau, he and Skye were still very much married, as the scheming minx had declined to sign their annulment papers.
Although Skye eventually agreed to a divorce (not before lying about having given birth to Ben’s child!), she wasn’t done causing problems for Viki and Ben. The rowdy redhead hooked up with Max Holden (James DePaiva) to go after Ben, but ended up learning major dirt about Max —he wasn’t the real Buchanan heir. Not ready to be undone by Skye, Max bedded her to convince her to keep his secret, igniting a rivalry between the woman and Asa’s ex-wife Blair Cramer (Kassie DePaiva), who was still in love with Max.
When Blair shot Max in the back, Todd Manning (Roger Howarth) framed Skye. It was a good thing the vixen’s long lost mother Gretel Rae Cummings (a still fresh from Another World, Linda Dano), was banging a cop, who helped her get out on bail.
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Eventually the truth about not on Max’s shooting, but Skye’s real paternity came out, devastating the woman who had believed she was the daughter of Adam and Althea Chandler her whole life. After Adam himself showed up in Llanview, PA and confirmed Skye wasn’t his biological daughter, the woman demanded Rae tell her who sired her. This led to a second multi-soap saga, which saw Rae and Skye heading to General Hospital’s Port Charles (both the fictional city and the spinoff soap!) in search of Skye’s real father. Rae had previously visited the entire ABC lineup looking for her missing child.
While Rae ended up finding a surprise parent of her own in All My Children’s long-retired carnie Myrtle Fargate (the late Eileen Herlie), Skye found whom she believed to be her father in Port Charles doctor Alan Quartermaine (Stuart Damon) on General Hospital.
In Port Charles, Skye discovered a family so dysfunctional, they made the Chandlers of Pine Valley look like the Waltons — the Quartermaines. She fit right in! While her newfound “father” and “grandfather,” Alan and Edward (John Ingle) immediately took to who they believed to be their cut from the same cloth kin, Alan’s wife Monica (Leslie Charleson) was none-too-pleased to have yet another of her husband’s illegitimate children squatting. While Monica had learned to love Alan's song Jason (Steve Burton) as her own, she despised Skye. It didn’t help that the painfully-insecure adult paid Alan and Monica’s adopted, teenage daughter Emily (Amber Tamblyn) to leave town!
Skye may not have gotten on with her little “sister” at first, but she found a kindred spirit (and fellow 12-Stepper) in Alan and Monica’s firstborn son AJ (Billy Warlock). After AJ tried to blackmail Skye about her part in driving Emily out of town, the two actually became friends. Skye even went so far as to help her new “bro” come up with ways to snatch his son Michael back away from ex-wife Carly Corinthos (Tamara Braun).
Skye managed to find love and marriage in Port Charles with Aussie corporate raider Jasper “Jax” Jacks (Ingo Rademacher). Too bad the love of Jax’s life, Brenda Barrett (Vanessa Marcil Giovinazzo) was very much alive and returned to Port Charles amid tons of mob drama. Brenda believed she was dying, courtesy of manipulations from her maniacal captor Luis Alcazar (Ted King), and therefore decided to stay away from Jax. When Jax found out a jealous Skye had learned Brenda wasn’t dying and kept the news to himself, he promptly divorced her to reunite with Brenda.
A devastated Skye got smashed and slept with Alcazar, who was later pushed from the balcony of his penthouse. Skye, Brenda and many other citizens of Port Charles were all suspected of having offed the arms trader, but in the end it was revealed to be a grieving Alexis Davis (Nancy Lee Grahn) who did the deed.
Skye may not have been convicted of murder, but she had still lost Jax and on top of everything else, her vicious “aunt” Tracy Quartermaine (Jane Elliott) showed up in town with proof Skye wasn’t Alan’s daughter. Despite the revelation, Alan , Edward, AJ and later Emily (Natalia Livingston) continued to love Skye as family. Ex-cousin Ned (Wally Kurth) took it a step further and started sleeping with her. Talk about keeping it in the family!
While Skye by this point was no longer a biological Quartermaine, she was a permanent part of the Port Charles fabric, even romancing the town’s most infamous citizen — Luke Spencer (Tony Geary). While she left town in 2008 with daughter Lila Rae in tow, she still pops up from time to time to stir up trouble. We wouldn’t have it any other way!
Robin Christopher Photo Credit: ABC
Photo of Linda Dano by PR Photos
No. 4. Jake and Vicky McKinnon and Cass and Lila Winthrop from Another World to As The World Turns
Devastated fans of NBC’s Another World were thrilled when they learned four characters from the sudser were spinning off to fellow Procter and Gamble soap opera As The World Turns. The week after AW went off in June of 1999, Jake and Vicky McKinnon (Tom Eplin and Jensen Buchanan), Cass and Lila Winthrop (Stephen Schnetzer and Lisa Peluso) all popped up in the fictional Oakdale, Illinois, only a hop, skip and a train track crossing from AW’s Bay City.
Alas, it would only be newspaperman Jake, who would become a semi-permanent fixture in their transplant town, as Cass and Lila quickly headed back to Bay City (with Cass popping up from time to time to offer legal services to the townsfolk) and beloved heroine Vicky being killed off in a plane crash!
Vicky’s demise came at the hand of AlecWallace, a less-than-memorable Oakdale baddie, whom Jack was investigating for Lucinda Walsh’s (Elizabeth Hubbard) newspaper the City Times. During his time in Oakdale, Jake had several promising storylines, including a popular love affair with Molly Conlin (Lesli Kay). He was even briefly reunited with Vicky’s ghost, who returned to guide Molly and Jake to finding the twin daughters she gave birth to prior to her death.
Finally happy, Jake and Molly had just begun to settle into life as a family with little Bridget and Michelle when tragedy struck again.The deranged nanny who had been tormenting Molly’s daughter Abigail shot Jake dead! His former mother-in-law Donna Love (Anna Stuart) and ex-wife/sister-in-law Marley McKinnon (Ellen Wheeler) promptly snatched Bridget and Michelle away from a grieving Molly, thus ridding Oakdale of all things Another World. Not exactly a fitting end for Jake and Vicky, two of soap’s most popular characters ever.
No. 3. Dr. Angela Hubbard from All My Children to Loving/The City
When soap opera lovers think of the name "Angie Hubbard," All My Children generally comes to mind. While Angie (Debbi Morgan) and Jesse's (Darnell Williams) epic Pine Valley love story is definitely one for the record books, a notable portion of Angie's ABC Daytime history was spent in the cities of Corinth and New York on Loving and its spinoff sudser The City.
In 1993, Morgan reprised her iconic role, not on All My Children, but another Agnes Nixon gem, Loving (Nixon co-created the serial with the late Douglas Marland). Angie moved to the small town of Corinth, Pennsylvania with her and the “late” Jesse’s teenage son Frankie (Alimi Ballard).There, Angie fell in love with cop Charles Harrison (Geoffrey Ewing), only to later be rocked to her core when a man by the name of Jacob (also Williams) showed up in town. Jacob was the spitting image of her late husband. It turned out Jacob was Jesse’s identical cousin (What, it can happen? Didn’t you watch The Patty Duke Show?). Angie found herself caught up in a Lov-ing triangle with her new husband Charles and Jacob.
A divorce from Charles, followed by most of the townsfolk of Corinth being slaughtered like fattened pigs by country clubber Gwyneth Alden (Elizabeth Savage), had Angie, Jacob and several other Loving characters looking for a fresh start. They all moved to Soho in The City, where Angie opened a free clinic and Jacob a bar. Jacob and Angie eventually married and adopted a baby, Cassandra, before The City went off the air in 1997.
No. 2. Tracy Quartermaine from General Hospital to The City
Deceitful, General Hospital corporate maven Tracy Quartermaine (Jane Elliott) paid her Port Charles, New York kin an unexpected visit in 1996. After failing to blackmail her way back into control of family firm ELQ, Tracy left the quarrelsome Q’s behind and moved to Soho. There she took possession—via blackmail of course— of the apartment building owned by Sydney Chase (Morgan Fairchild), thus replacing the blonde bombshell as The City’s resident superbitch.
The fact that her impressionable, young son Dillon was with her, didn’t stop Tracy from getting mixed up with New York mob boss Gino Soleito. Tracy ultimately married Gino — just before he took a dirt nap. Suddenly, Edward and Lila’s (John Ingle and the late Anna Lee) daughter found herself the “Godmother” of an organized crime family! Tracy didn’t hesitate to wield her new powerbase as a weapon against the family who’d kicked her to the curb. She had a band of goodfellas go to her sister-in-law Monica’s (Leslie Charleson) mansion back home in Port Charles and rob her relations blind on Thanksgiving Day. Eventually, Tracy made her way back to Port Charles and General Hospital, where her brief marriage into the mob some 15 years earlier, is currently coming back to haunt her.
No. 1. Sheila Carter, Lauren and Scott Grainger from The Young and the Restless to The Bold and the Beautiful
Unlike most daytime soaps during the 80’s and 90’s, CBS Daytime’s The Young and the Restless didn’t do the whole "omnipresent, undefeatable supervillain, who keeps returning from the dead" thing. The show’s creator, the late William J. Bell, believed heinous villains must be punished, via death or imprisonment, at the end of their arcs. This proved problematic for Bell in 1992, when one of his most dastardly creations ever—the character of deranged nurse Sheila Carter (Kimberlin Brown)—proved so incredibly popular, Bell had to find a way to keep Sheila going.
He accomplished that feat, by spinning off Sheila to his other daytime soap opera, The Bold and the Beautiful. After Sheila, who had infamously stolen her romantic rival Lauren Fenmore’s (Tracey Bregman) baby and given her a sickly black market infant to raise, was found to be a lunatic, she tried to off her own mother, as well as Lauren! When Lauren knocked over a lantern, burning down the farmhouse where Sheila was holding her and Molly captive, the deadly Florence Nightingale was presumed dead.
The following week, Sheila turned up very much alive and headed for Los Angeles, California on The Bold and the Beautiful. In L.A., Sheila began building a new life. She got herself hired as both the nurse at Forrester Creations and as the nanny for the wealthy Forrester family’s newest addition, Eric Forrester II. She also set her sights on the baby’s father, the family’s dashing patriarch Eric (John McCook).
Sheila soon managed to worm her way into Eric’s heart and bed, much to the chagrin of his first wife Stephanie (Susan Flannery) and their children. Sheila found a more sympathetic ex-Mrs. Forrester in Brooke Logan (Katherine Kelly Lang), who was carrying a child that either belonged to Eric, or his son Ridge (Ron Moss). Believing she was doing both Brooke and herself a favor, Sheila switched the DNA tests to make it look like Brooke’s true love Ridge was baby Bridget’s daddy.
When Lauren, who happened to be an old family friend of the Forresters, learned Sheila was alive and well, she quickly hightailed it to L.A., with plans of exposing her rival. Too bad for Lauren, Sheila had naughty pics of the department store diva getting freaky sneaky with Brad Carlton (Don Diamont) back in Genoa City!
Undeterred, Lauren vowed to reveal Sheila’s demented past at her wedding to Eric, causing Sheila to miss her own dream nuptials. Sheila and Eric eventually tied the knot, but their marriage hits a major rough patch when Sheila sided with Brooke during the whole BeLieF patent drama that resulted in Brooke walking away with control of 51 percent of Forrester Creations.
To try to get their marriage back on track, Eric and Sheila headed to Catalina, where they ran into a vacationing Scotty and Lauren. Lauren viewed this chance meeting as the perfect opportunity to finally out Sheila to Eric; however a dying Scott begged Lauren to let Sheila be happy with her new husband.
In the end, Lauren didn’t have to worry about ruining Sheila’s marriage to Eric. The monstrous trophy wife did that all on her own, when she slept with another man and lied to Eric that she was pregnant with the latest Forrester heir. Eric, who’d had a vasectomy, wanted a divorce, but Sheila almost got the last laugh when she held the entire Forrester family at gunpoint and threatened to kill them!
Meanwhile, Sheila’s foe, Lauren Fenmore, ended up moving out to L.A. for a time herself and romanced both Ridge and Eric (What is it about the Forrester family father/son special?!). Although Sheila has been gone from both Los Angeles and Genoa City for quite some time now, the havoc she wreaked on The Young and the Restless and The Bold and the Beautiful is still felt to this day.
Honorable Crossovers:
Mike and Hope Bauer from The Guiding Light to Another World
Brooke Logan, Jack Abbott and Victor Newman The Young and the Restless/The Bold and The Beautiful
Felicia Forrester from The Bold and the Beautiful to The Young and the Restless
