It’s been over a decade since One Life To Live ended its 43-year run on ABC, and star Kassie DePavia still feels the sting.
“It was a gut punch,” DePavia told Remind Magazine on Tuesday. The Kentucky-born actress and singer, 64, starred on the daytime soap as Blair Cramer from 1993 until its cancellation in 2012, and in 2013, reprised her role for the few months production company Prospect Park attempted to revive the show as a daily 30-minute web series. Beloved for her fiery, unpredictable personality, wild storylines, and contentious relationships with characters played by Roger Howarth and James DePavia, whom she married in 1996.
One Life to Live provided DePavia with a steady home — a rare thing for a working actor — for two decades. It wasn’t just that ABC canceled the series, but how it was canceled that hurt her.
“We were brought onto the stage of The View, and it was One Life to Live and All My Children, we were fully expecting for them to make the announcement that All My Children was being canceled, but then they did both and it was just awful,” DePavia recalled. “And then we had to go back on set and work, and I just remember going down to my dressing room and calling my mom. It was really sad, and it was just so bizarre that it was canceled. It was doing so well, and our numbers were really good. I just didn’t understand it and I missed it. I had to mourn. It took me two years to get over that, to grieve that loss.”
As Blair, DePavia had endured things most actors couldn’t even imagine in a role: survive a brush with Irish terrorists, give birth after surviving a car accident, shoot one lover, and cover up the crime with another. But the loss of One Life to Live itself was brutal.
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Still, DePavia considers herself “a lucky, lucky girl to walk into that part,” and her career continued to flourish after the history book closed on that chapter of soap history. She even went on to earn Emmy recognition for her role as Eve Donovan, which she played on Days of Our Lives from 2014-2020, and again in 2023.
Heidi Gutman/ABC/Courtesy Everett Collection
Even harder than leaving OLTL was briefly reprising her character to help her old flame successfully transition to a new soap.
“When One Life to Live ended and they took me to General Hospital for those three or four days to break Todd and Blair up so Todd could be with Carly, it was the most heartbreaking thing I’ve ever done,” DePavia revealed.
Like DePavia, Howarth reprised his character on the short-lived OLTL web revival. But before that, his character crossed the great, soapy divide over to General Hospital, and DePavia was tapped to help ease the transition by filming a break-up scene over several episodes.
“I felt I’d worked 20 years to build this brand, and you’re gonna give me three days to be pissed off at Todd, and that’s gonna be it? That would never ever happen. Not in a million years. So that was hard,” she reflected.
DePavia did get the chance to play Blair one more time, when in 2023, General Hospital invited the actress back for a guest spot as Blair.
