Soap Opera Digest, Dec. 1991
Tammy Lauren (Ginger Szabo)
“I’m walking on a back lot! I’m walking on a back lot!” an enthusiastic Ginger says when she visits her first Hollywood studio. It’s portrayer Tammy Lauren who imbues Ginger with her vivacious qualities. And even though Ginger’s trip to Tinsel Town takes place in 1945 and Lauren is very much a nineties woman, the two could be soul mates.
“If there is some of me in Ginger, I wouldn’t be able to tell you, because I think the ultimate, toughest role for an actress is to play yourself,” Lauren notes. “It definitely would be for me. Ginger is very buoyant and very happy, and there’s a lot of energy about her.”
Certainly Lauren had enough of that ambitious energy to successfully carry her through the trials and tribulations of the transition from a child performer who made her debut in Who’s Watching the Kids?, with James Belushi, to an adult actress. Although she’s been acting since age seven, Lauren says she was never trained. “I learned through experience, so I was basically mimicking. I was a child actress, and that’s all you do is mimic. So I put a picture in my head, and then I mimic it, you know?” she says.
Because she’s just twenty-something, it seems it would be difficult for Lauren to mimic the life-style of women who lived fifty years ago, but she contends it’s not. “My father put it best. He said that, funny enough, trends, mental thought - they sort of go around in circles. And all the problems women dealt with then, we’re still dealing with today. So it’s not difficult at all. In fact, it’s probably much easier when you don’t know the time period. But my father likes to talk a lot, and I heard a lot of stories about the war. When women were women and men were men, you know?”
In the Homefront story, Ginger’s man is fiance Jeff, with whom Ginger has shared many a steamy love scene. Though they are awkward for her, Lauren maintains that love scenes are no big deal. “I’ve had my first kiss maybe a hundred times, so that’s not awkward,” she says. “My favorite love scene was in Desperate for Love. I did it with Christian Slater and Brian Bloom (ex-Dusty, As The World Turns) – both of whom are prettier than I am. And the funniest thing is that we shot most of these love scenes at this mill in Georgia. We had a week set aside just for love scenes. I’d usually go in with one guy, do a scene, come back out, grab the other one and go back in. Talk about feeling a little promiscuous. It was to the point where I’d come out and go, ‘Next! Come on in, boys.’ I would certainly have to say that the feeling of awkwardness surely leaves you then, because it’s just a gag. On the last day of filming, the whole crew lined up outside the mill. I must have been beet red.”
So maybe there is a little Tammy in Ginger.
Sammi Davis-Voss (Caroline
Hailey)
“I was made for this role,” says Sammi Davis-Voss of her alter ego, Caroline. “I spent my whole life preparing for it!”
Though Davis-Voss isn’t entirely serious she presents a good case: At eighteen, she did a six-week run of a play about the effects of World War II in Birmingham, England, near the town of Kidderminster, where she grew up. At twenty-two, she did Hope and Glory, about the war’s ravages in London, which required volumes of research. Finally, a native Brit, she’s a transplant to America. “All put together, I feel I can really relate to Caroline,” she says.
Still, life in Caroline’s era took some getting used to. “They didn’t have all the things we’re used to now, you know, anything goes. We don’t have that innocence – that innocent desire for stuff.” This is not to say that Caroline doesn’t have desires – and sexual ones at that. In light of the libidinous roles she’s had in Hope and Glory, Lair of the White Worm and Horseplayer, Davis-Voss says she’s surprised, but has to admit that there might be typecasting at work.
“I’m completely the opposite,” she maintains. “I mean, Caroline is very outrageous. But I do seem to be cast in these things and I don’t know why. But women like that are very interesting. Caroline is not a monster or anything. She’s very clever and very intelligent, and she’s using her sexuality to get what she wants.” (Perhaps Davis-Voss learned a thing or two from her characters; she met director Kurt Voss while working on Horseplayer and married him six months later.)
Since Davis-Voss had already established
herself as a feature film actress, it may have come as a surprise to some that
she was willing to commit to a long-term television series. But the actress
doesn’t see why it would. “I always take parts in projects that interest me –
whether it’s a movie or TV – if I can read the whole script without getting
bored. This I could,” she explains. “I spent the year prior to doing this
reading scripts – mainly movie scripts – and just throwing them in the bin
because I found them just so boring. You know, the same old thing – same girl,
same gun, same guy, just the same story. I got fed up with it. And then this
came along, and I find it fascinating.”