This article appeared in the September 1972 issue of DAYTIME TV.
It is accompanied by photos of Gillian Spencer (Victoria Riley).
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“I Feel Very Peaceful, and I’m Happy With My Life”
WHY GILLIAN SPENCER IS QUITING AS AN ACTRESS
“I Believe in Finding the True Center of Yourself”
Gillian Spencer is a cool, regal, blue-eyed blonde who talks perceptively on almost any subject, except her home life.
“I have two sons, and I Won’t tell you their names or ages,” she declares.
Why? “Because I don’t want to impose the structure of my life on theirs! Parents are always wanting to build a structure for their children, but children will build their own structures,” she points out.
Obviously, Gillian Spencer (who’s been playing Jennifer Ryan since Feb. 2 on As the World Turns) believes that everybody should have their freedom to do their own thing.
When her marriage broke up (she won’t reveal the name of her ex-husband), she moved to Hollywood for a year and began to do a lot of thinking about her life. She had begun studying religion, and then it got her into witchcraft, and that got her into Tarot cards, and then into archeology, which led to anthropology and the theorist of analyst Dr. Carl Jung.
It’s my journey of self discovery,” she points out.
Soon she lost “the need that brought me into acting. The thing that acting filled for me no longer worked.” She began to study at the University of California at Los Angeles and also at Santa Monica Junior High School. She moved back to New York when she was offered the dual role of Victoria Lord and Nicole Smith on One Life to Live, and also attended courses at Hunter College.
Then, about a year ago, she made the big decision: to work for her Master’s in anthropology and eventually teach the subject. “I’d like to work my way out of acting and into teaching.”
The idea of working towards stardom in acting just doesn’t appeal to her any more - despite a dozen active years in TV movies and stage.
She’s the only daughter of stage actress Helen Shea and James Scully, a set designer who now has his own business. They still live in Scarsdale, N.Y., and Gillian recently moved into an old farmhouse (built in 1850 or earlier) on several acres, with a lake and guest house, not too far away.
With a help of a housekeeper, Gillian and her sons are having a wonderful time, growing tomatoes and corn, fishing and swimming, breathing the fresh air – and it’s only a 40 minute drive from New York. Adding to the fun are two stray dogs which Doris Belack (Anna Craig on One Life to Live) helped her round up with in New York. “Maria, part Boxer and part racing hound, was running loose in Central Park, and Dog, part shepherd and part basengi, we found loose in the subway. They’re happy on our farm now.”
Her aim in life is to move “further and further out into the country.” Yet she’s no country girl. “I was born in Seattle, on a Dec. 18, and we moved a lot, and I grew up in Scarsdale, N.Y. I went to London on a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. And when I returned to New York, I got on my first soap, The Secret Storm, around 1960. I played Lynn Wilkins Warren on Edge of Night in 1962 or 3, and I was on Guiding Light as Robin Fletcher in 1964/6, and then I did the dual role on One Life to Live in 1968/9.”
She was baptized Jill Ann, but in London (at the Royal Academy) she was told, “Jill Ann, couldn’t possibly be your name and ‘Gillian’ must be your name.” And Gillian (a Welsh name) became hers.
Munching a medium rare hamburger in the CBS cafeteria, she chatted wormly about life. “Would I do the same things if I had my life to live over again? That’s impossible to answer. If I had the same needs and the same knowledge, I’d do the same. But if I knew then what I know now, then I’d have gone off in another direction.”
You ask, “If you were a dictator with great power, what would you change?” She answers, “I’d whish for more internalization – meaning more than knowing yourself … meaning the whole attitude toward living. Yes, I mean more introspection and more passivity. Closer to the Oriental attitudes. Yes, I’m not sold on our Western culture.”
“Are you more optimistic about the world the more you study?” we ask and she responds, “No, I don’t think the world is going to improve overnight. Until there’s a change in man, there will be no change in wars and other devastations.”
“Do you have faith? … Do you believe? In anything … in the necessity of individuation, which means finding the true center of yourself.” (The dictionary calls individuation “the process leading to individual existence, as distinct from that of the species.”)
She wears a chain around her neck from which held the gold ankah symbol. “It’s the cross and the loop, and it brings together the principles of dark and light, making unity.”
“Would you marry again?” And she says, “I haven’t thought about it.” And you ask, “Wouldn’t your sons want their mother to remarry?” She responds, “I hope my son are content with themselves and not needing to depend on other’s lives.”
“What would make you very happy?” is another question, and she is quick to answer, “I feel very peaceful, and I’m happy in what I’m doing with my life. Whatever happens will happen. I enjoy the discovery; it does not matter what the results are. Just working for whatever it is, is good enough.”
She finishes her snack, goes out of the CBS studio, says a warm good-bye, and is off in a taxi; a cercal mysterious blonde!