My First Role

Daytime Stars Open Their Career  Scrapbooks

Before joining BOLD AND BEAUTIFUL as debonair Eric Forrester, John McCook was a major star on another Bell show. From 1976-1980, McCook wowed’em as the dashing Lance Prentiss on YOUNG AND RESTLESS.

„My first day [at YOUNG AND RESTLESS] was horrifying,“ cringes John McCook. „I had worked mostly in theater and done a few things on film. But never in a broadcast studio. [Y&R] was live on tape - that’s what was so scary about it. It was like we were doing it live, so they never stopped the video machine. You would finish a scene and fade to black, but the video machine would keep running. They would leave two minutes of black in there for the commercials, and then they would fade up on the next scene. In those two minutes of black, the cameras were scrambling, and the actors were going over to the next set and getting into position. It was very different from what we do now.“

Y&R’s Lance had the charm and elegance of BOLD AND BEAUTIFUL’s Eric, but „Lance wore a tuxedo a lot more than Eric,“ laughs McCook. „Lance was unattached when we fist saw him, and he was free to pursue all sorts of things - his success, his money. But we never saw him making his money. We just knew he was very rich and had a company called Prentiss Industries. IN fact, we used to joke with the crew. I would be sitting at the desk in [Lance’s] private jet on the set. I’d pick u the pen, hold it up and say, ‘You know, we make these!’ because we didn’t know how Lance made his money. Or we’d point to the curtains in the room and say, ‘You know, Prentiss Industries makes these.’ We had to make things up because we had no idea [where the money came from].

„Working with Jaime Lyn Bauer [ex-Lauralee, Y&R; now Laura, DAYS OF OUR LIVES] was great. She was so in-the-moment. She would do the scenes differently every time [in rehearsal]. And then when we taped, you just never knew what she was going to do. If she screwed up, then we both screwed up, and it looked awful. That was chance-taking, but it was also very exciting. [Jaime] was very professional and very capable. We have great memories of what we did together.“

 By Sara Ford

Soap Opera Digest 10/13/98

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