She may be an Oscar winner now, but back in the ‘80s,
Melissa Leo spent her days as Linda Warner on
All My Children. Despite her upward mobility, she has not forgotten her roots. “I loved that part,”
Leo said of her time on
All My Children from 1984 to 1985. “When all is said and done I can say I was part of the great American soap opera.”
Best known for his Academy Award-winning role in 1993’s
The Fugitive,
Tommy Lee Jones has had a hugely successful acting
career. He’s played villains and secret agents in Hollywood blockbusters and critically acclaimed films. After studying at Harvard, Jones broke onto the acting scene in 1971 as Dr. Mark Toland on
One Life to Live. Behind his well-kempt, charming façade, Dr. Toland was a fraud and adulterer, who was ultimately shot dead for his dubious behavior. But the real reason the character’s life came to an end was because Jones told producers he was leaving after four years.
Many know Kelly Ripa as
Regis Philbin’s perky co-host on
Live With Regis and Kelly, but she made her big debut in the entertainment industry on
All My Children. Ripa joined the show in 1990 as the troubled, but popular Hayley Vaughan. “What I like about Hayley is that she’s not a quitter. She may sometimes feel like giving up but I have this sense that she never will,”
Ripa said back in the day. In addition to losing Regis, Ripa is also remiss to say goodbye to the famous soap. “
All My Children was more than a job,” the
actress said recently]. “It was my family. It was there that I met my husband [Mark Consuelos]; it was there when my first two children were born; it was there where I met many of my life-long friends.”
Before Sarah Michelle Geller became
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, she won a Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Younger Actress in a Drama Series as Kendall Hart on
All My Children. Gellar—who went on to play a victim in
I Know What You Did Last Summer and a conniving, seductive stepsister in
Cruel Intentions—praised
All My Children for keeping her grounded in the entertainment business. “You don't party when you're on a TV show,” Gellar said. “You go to bed for 10 hours and learn your lines. I never smoked and I didn't drink alcohol until I was 21.”
Ryan Phillippe came to fame in the ‘90s alongside Sarah Michelle Gellar in
I Know What You Did Last Summer and
Cruel Intentions, but his first big acting gig was also on
All My Children from 1992 to 1993 and become somewhat of an icon. Phillippe played Billy Douglas, the first gay teen to ever appear on daytime television. “I would worry, ‘What will the people at school think?’”' Phillippe later told
Men’s Health. “And they fully shunned me in a lot of ways. But it ended up being an incredible experience and such a time of growth.”
Ryan Phillippe’s current rumored girlfriend, Amanda Seyfried, also appeared on
All My Children… a full decade after him. The
Mamma Mia star played Joni Stafford from 2002 to 2003, but it was not her first soap opera gig. She had previously appeared on
Guiding Light and
As the World Turns. Her stint on
All My Children was her last soap opera role before turning to the big screen as Karen Smith in 2004’s
Mean Girls.
Josh Duhamel is widely recognized as pop star Fergie’s husband and the handsome actor in today’s outpouring of mediocre rom-coms. He starred in 2004’s
Win a Date With Tad Hamilton! and
Transformers (executive producer Stephen Spielberg hand-picked him for the film). But before he appeared in Hollywood blockbusters, Duhamel famously played Leo du Pres in
All My Children from 1992 to 2002, a role that earned him a Daytime Emmy for Best Supporting Actor. “I loved being on that show. I still stay in touch with a lot of people. It's something that is unfortunate,” he told
ESPN when asked about the show’s cancellation. "That's what's going on in the entertainment world. It's just cheaper to produce reality TV. It was a sad day for me when I heard the news."
This weekend, she goes gory in
Scream 4. But former
Heroes cheerleader Hayden Panettiere got her television start on
One Life to Live. In 1994, she was cast as
Sarah Roberts at just 4½ years old. Panettiere left the series in 1997 and moved on in the soap circuit to
Guiding Light.
Two years before he broke out as a villainous teen in 1988’s
Heathers, Christian Slater was a daytime heartthrob on
All My Children as Caleb Thompson in 1986.
Marcia Cross has quite a following as the redheaded beauty and “perfect” housewife Bree Van de Kamp on ABC’s
Desperate Housewives, which earned her a Golden Globe nomination in 2007. But Cross has been honing her acting skills since she joined the cast of the daytime drama
One Life to Live in 1986 as Kate Saunders. Though she was only on the show for one year, it catapulted her to the next biggest role in her career:
Melrose Place’s notorious whack job, Dr. Kimberly Shaw.
Everyone loved watching Laurence Fishburne train Neo in
The Matrix. But before he was Morpheus, he played Dr. Joshua Hall on
One Life to Live from 1973 to 1976—a part he landed at just 10 years old.
