Bo and Nora Forever Soulmates MESSAGE BOARD FAN FICTION VIDEOS & PICTURES FAVE SCENES ARTICLES HBS and NORA BIO RSW and BO BIO CHAT ROOM FAVE LINKS BO and NORA HOME PAGE E-MAIL US

HILLARY B. QUICK, HILLARY B. QUICK OLTL'S HILLARY B. SMITH IS ONE SLICK CHICK Soap Opera Magazine (September 30, 1997) A inveterate lover of word games, OLTL's quick-witted Hillary B. Smith(Nora) loves the challenge of tackling verbal puzzles. Solving the puzzle of the highly respected and perennially popular soap veteran produces a complete picture, one with pieces like home, family, and values-which are typically lost by those who lead their life in the public eye-firmly intact.   To be sure, the contagiously energetic Smith has planted her feet firmly on the ground. She's supported by a devoted husband, Phillip "Nip", a banker who has worked with his wife on the delicate balance of give-and-take in their careers. When Smith was offered the role of Margo Hughes on ATWT, she was toying with the idea of moving West, but her relationship kept her planted in the East. "When ATWT came up, my agents wanted me to move out to California because I had gotten a lot of work out there. I was torn, because I had this wonderful man I loved in Boston, and I was living in New York. So, we talked about it. He said, 'Let's get married, and see if you can back on a soap. Why don't we do that for the first couple of years of marriage and figure out what we want to do after that?'"   After the wedding, Smith commuted from Boston to New York to tape ATWT. "Finally we decided this was silly," Smith remembers. "I love what I do, and he loved what he did. So he decided, 'Okay, we'll move down to New Jersey,' in a right across the street from where he grew up. He got a job at Coldwell Banker, doing commercial real estate, and I continued on ATWT."   Later in the marriage - post-ATWT - Phillip's career was moving into high gear, and it was Smith's turn to make some sacrifices. "My kids(Courtney and Phips, now 11 and 9)were needing me at home. I was constantly in California-and my kids were getting a little freaked out," Smith admits. "They'd get mad and sit in my suitcases and say, 'Stay home with me.' My husband and I did some soul-searching. Did we want to raise kids in California? My husband's work was going really well. He wanted to start his own business, so I came back East, and put the word out that I would like to do another soap. Two weeks later I had a phone call form OLTL."   But the call coincided with Smith's vacation, so she kept OLTL waiting for two weeks. "I said, 'If the job is available in two weeks, great." Two weeks later they called and said, "Would you come down and see us now?' I said 'Yes.' "   Smith recalls with amusement the colorful, bumpy road that brought her to Llanview. "Nora actually came from (then head writer) Michael Malone's novel Time's Witness. Linda Gottlieb, then executive producer, said, 'Why don't we use this character, make her Hank's ex-wife, get her to stir up some trouble and see what happens!"   When Smith first read for Gottlieb and the powers-that-be, she was under the impression that they wanted Nora to be a Lauren Bacall. 'So I walked in pretty confident of what I wanted to do. When you go to a soap, you have to go in with the way you want to do the character - and if that's not what they want, then walk happily out the door. There's no point in taking a job where you'll constantly butting heads."   Smith didn't understand the dead silence following her reading, until Gottlieb explained they actually saw Nora as being more Katherine Hepburn. Someone had mistakenly written "Lauren Bacall" on the script. So, Smith gave Nora her best Hepburn spin - and left thinking that she had blown it. To her amazement, she was called back. "There were three of us. One was a brunette, one was a redhead, and then there was me, with sort of light brown hair. So I did the screen test with Bob Woods. I thought he was just adorable and charming - but he liked someone else all together!" she says with a laugh. "Probably because he liked someone else, they hired me - Linda liked to do that to him."   After the screen test, Smith had more colorful issues to iron out. "We had our meeting with Linda, and she said, 'What do you think about going red? I don't get your hair.' And I said,' Well you've got a redhead downstairs, why don't you just hire her?" And with that quip, Nora Gannon, personified by Hillary B. Smith, was born. "It wasn't so much a bumpy start; everyone was just setting off their boundaries, marking off their territories and I respected that about her," Smith remembers.   Recalling her debut on the Llanview scene brought back wistful memories of then head writer Michael Malone. "I love Michael. I'm working on a project with him right now. I adore him and(co-head writer) Josh Griffith, and I think the two of them were the most talented writing team, and it was criminal to have them broken up and released from the show. Criminal. I don't know whose thinking it was. I thought it was sheer brilliance-but then again I was one of those people being used. The people who weren't being used didn't find it so brilliant. But when he wrote for you, it was fabulous."   Smith concedes that the show's behind-the-scenes transitions have taken their professional tolls. "My problem-and it's not secret-I've spent three and a half years on the back burner, and I was willing to wait and wait and wait, and I've been promised and promised and promised, but it's really hard to keep the faith going. But I have great respect for(executive producer) Maxine Levinson, and (co-head-writers) Claire and Matt Labine. Since the Labines came on, I no longer dread coming to work. I just hated what I had to play during one of those transition periods, when writers came and went. But I enjoy what I'm doing now. It's filler, but it's interesting to me.   "I know they would like to come up with a story for me; whether they're able to or not remains to be seen. Unfortunately, I'm in the position now where I have to keep my options open," Smith reveals. "I gave them a year to come up with something and they gave me a year to go off and do whatever I wanted if something came up. They've held up their end of the bargain in terms of something coming up, and I've held up my end of the bargain by waiting. But the clock is running out. Hopefully, they'll come up with something and all of this conversation with be moot. But you start thinking, 'How long came I stay on the back burner?' That's not what I came to daytime to do."   The versatile Smith came to daytime to act her heart out-something she's been doing since her college days. Acting proved to be her ultimate-but not only-love. The Sarah Lawrence alumna originally pursued dual interests in acting and genetics. But "seven hours of sniffing urine just wasn't doing it for me. I'd much rather be in that theater."   Smith's parents were largely supportive of her choice of art over science, especially after her effects began to pay off. The youngest of four girls ("I got punched a lot," Smith jokingly recalls of her sisters), the Boston native moved to Florida when she was 2 and her father, an engineer, changed jobs. "My father had been a lieutenant commander on a submarine. No one could figure out how to put the ballast in a minature submarine and still get people in it, so he designed a ballast system that went on the outside of the submarine instead of the inside." Smith's mother is a homemaker. "She called it a 'domestic engineer,' and then that turned into 'maid.' "   With Smith outgrew the limiting confines of her Palm Beach, Fla., milieu, she moved onto boarding school. "Palm Beach was much more of a seasonal town. Kids come down with their parents for the season, from Christmas to Easter. It was great for vacation, but to live there, it was a very different kind of upbringing. It was like being raised in Beverly Hills, or any other place where the value system is skewed on way-where you don't get a full cross-section of how people really live. I was very happy to move."   One of the seasonal transients who crossed her path was her future husband, Phillip," I met him when I was 14. He was down visiting his roommate from boarding school. I was a very good tennis player, so we got matched up to play tennis. Needless to say, he was my first love. We didn't see each other for a number of years after that, and then our best friends got married. At their wedding, we got back together, and a year later, we were married! Come full circle, that we did."   Smith has been a soap fan since early childhood, thanks in part to the family housekeeper. " She'd pick me up from kindergarten and we would come home and watch soaps. And there were Susan Lucci and Robin Strasser, and I thought, 'Wow, it's amazing, these two beauties of daytime.' " And now, Smith has taken her place among the ranks of Lucci, Strasser, and Slezak-and her work has been recognized as fans and peers alike. "She's pretty damn good at what she does," notes co-star Bob Woods. "She's a great actress; she makes it easy. Stuff just clicks."   Like the winning solution to one of her word games, Smith's personally life is clicking as well. "If you're going to have kids, being with them, enjoying them and bringing them up to be responsible human beings in the world is what it's all about. Enjoy them being little; they're going to go off and start their own lives. We have plans for that. We know when that day comes it will be difficult for us. My God, my daughter went to camp for the first time and I was devastated. My son was away for the might, too, and my husband and I were walking around the house saying, "What do we do now? All right, let's sit down and talk.' Now there's a concept!"