Small Steps

Maureen Garrett is sublime. Maureen Garrett is complex. Maureen Garrett is beautiful.

I could go on... and in fact, I will. The character of Holly has been one of my favorites since I started watching GL and I never tire of watching Garrett work her special magic onscreen, transforming her hard luck trainwreck of a character into a thing of unique beauty and mystery. The intelligence and passion that she brings to every word of dialogue or even the smallest motion is always breathtaking and fascinating.

She grabs and holds my attention and makes me feel, even when the material fails her, as it often has in the lean Holly years of 21st century GL. It seems my Holly has fallen by the wayside for the powers that be at GL and that's a shame because she could be contributing so much to the show.

Today's actor spotlight is on Maureen Garrett (obviously), who joined GL in 1976, replacing the original Holly, Lynn Deerfield. Deerfield played the role for six years beginning in 1970 and by all accounts was pretty good in the role, but it was Garrett who turned Holly into a daytime icon through the character's decades-spanning, tortured relationship with Roger Thorpe (played by the late Michael Zaslow). Zaslow's untimely death in 1998 left the show (which already seemed to be running short on a desire to really write for Holly) in a quandry as to what to do with the character. 1999 saw a disatrous story turn in which Holly was cast as a demented Pied Piper, kidnapping the children of all of Springfield's young heroines (and one of Reva's children too ). This led to a skimpy decade following this character-breaking tale and that's the decade I'm focusing on today.

It says quite a lot that Garrett was still able to elicit sympathy for Holly in the years following the kidnap tale, but she did. She did it by seizing what could easily have been crippling to another actor and using it as a powerful engine to add new layers of complexity to her already troubled character. The years between 2000 and 2005 were, as I said above, lean years for Holly stories, but when they came, Garrett made magic-- an indefinably special, wholly unique, rapturously engaging magic.

What follows are some of Garrett's best moments from this decade, two new clipsets and two individual clips from previously posted sets.

Small Steps (from 2003-- also featuring Ed, Michelle, and Bill)

clip 1, clip 2, clip 3

He Is Just Away (from 2004-- also featuring Blake, Sebastian, Phillip, Ross, and Alan)

clip 1, clip 2, clip 3, clip 4

2002 clip (also featuring Ed, Reva, Lillian, and Richard-- this clip goes a long way toward illustrating why I much prefer Garrett over Kim Zimmer)

2001 clip (also featuring Buzz, Meta, Phillip, Rick, and others)

A YouTube cavalcade of Holly clips from many decades can be found here. As loyal readers of my blog know, the clips marked "ivnkplng" and "classicGL" were posted by me.