On Her Days of Our Lives Julie-versary, Susan Seaforth Hayes Reveals the Surprising Reason She Landed the Role
Three years into Days of Our Lives’ run on NBC, the soap had already gone through three Julie Olsons. The first of them left of her own accord, and her short-lived successors were shown the door. What the show needed was an actress who wouldn’t just play the part but really inhabit it and breathe life into the troubled teenager.
Enter Susan Seaforth. (The Hayes would come later.) Even though the native of Oakland, Calif., was only in her 20s, she was already making waves in Hollywood. She’d guest-starred on everything from Lassie to Bonanza and even passed through General Hospital as Dorothy Bradley, a romantic rival for that daytime drama’s original hard-luck heroine, Angie Costello.
And not to put too fine a point on it, but the kid had chops!
Trial by Fire
When Seaforth auditioned for Days of Our Lives’ powers that be — which back in the day included future Young & Restless and Bold & Beautiful co-creator William J. Bell as headwriter — she didn’t just walk through her scene. On the contrary, she went for broke opposite Denise Alexander, whose Susan Martin was a magnet for heartache.
“I was supposed to confront Denise and try to cause her to have a heart attack but instead bring on my own labor pains,” Seaforth Hayes recalled for Soap Opera Digest in 2018. So “I gave it everything I had — tears and hysterics… ”
Needless to say, the up-and-comer was thrilled when her Herculean efforts won her the job. The only thing was… her performance wasn’t why she was hired. Years later, she asked Bell why he’d chosen her for the part. “He said, ‘I liked your smile — so there!’” she told the magazine. “That was kind of a kick in the head to say, ‘Well, maybe you weren’t quite at your zenith of acting ability, but you had potential.’”
A Rip-Roaring Success
Potential? Ha! That’s putting it mildly. Seaforth Hayes and late husband Bill Hayes, whom she wed two years after their characters tied the knot in 1974, made Julie and Doug Williams daytime’s first supercouple — and have the Time magazine cover to prove it. Together, they received Lifetime Achievement Awards at the 2018 Daytime Emmys and published a joint autobiography, Like Sands Through the Hourglass.
And while Bell might have initially been more impressed by the legend-in-the-making’s smile than her performance, he certainly came to realize what a superstar he’d discovered. He was so wowed by the spark and vulnerability that she brought to Julie that, when he created Bold & Beautiful, she was his first pick to play that show’s matriarch, Stephanie Forrester. (Another Days of Our Lives MVP, Susan Flannery, accepted the role.) He also cast Seaforth Hayes as Lauren Fenmore’s Mommie Dearest Joanna Manning on Young & Restless during the daytime icon’s mid-1980s break from Days of Our Lives. (She’d recur for years afterward.)
