Eileen Fulton, As the World Turns Star, Dead at 91

Hollywood is mourning the loss of a legendary actress.
Eileen Fulton, who starred on As the World Turns for nearly five decades, died July 14, according to an obituary shared by her funeral home, in Asheville, North Carolina, following a period of declining health. She was 91.
After graduating from Greensboro College with a music degree back in 1956, it was only four years before Fulton—born Margaret Elizabeth McLarty—joined the CBS soap opera to star as villainess Lisa Miller until the show ended in 2010.
And while not everyone was a fan of her character, there were many ways in which Fulton, who studied under famed acting coaches such as Sanford Meisner and Lee Strasberg throughout her career, differed from Lisa’s antagonism.
“Her dreams, her ideals were certainly totally different from Eileen Fulton,” she told NPR in 2010. “She depended on men to do this, that, and the other thing—and to make her rich. Believe me, that’s not how I am. I create. I believe in setting goals, and going after it, and getting it. But as the years have gone on, there’s more of a melding.”
As one of the longest-running soap opera actors in American television, Fulton was inducted into the Soap Opera Hall of Fame in 1998 as well as honored with a Daytime Emmy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004.
In addition to her lasting work onscreen, Fulton also fulfilled her lifelong dreams of being on Broadway in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf as well as the off-Broadway musical The Fantasticks.
“I dreamed of being the greatest actress on Broadway,” she told The Washington Post in 1990. “I love to sing. I love to make the audience cry. Of course, then I have to cheer them up.”
She also performed a cabaret act around New York City and Los Angeles for many years as well as authored several books, including her 1970 autobiography How My World Turns and its 1995 counterpart As My World Still Turns, before retiring in 2019 and relocating to Black Mountain, North Carolina.
Fulton is survived by her brother Charles Furman McLarty, her niece Katherine Morris and her sister-in-law Chris Page McLarty.
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