Anne Heche was truly respected within the daytime soap opera world going back decades to her landmark — and Emmy-winning — performance as good-and-evil twins Vicky Hudson and Marley Love on NBC’s defunct “Another World.” Above is a step back in time for a look at the late actress’ star-making performances.
From 1987-1991, Heche wowed viewers with her nuanced portrayals, even frequently acting opposite herself in scenes. Marley was the good girl; Victoria the bad seed. A soap opera cliché? Yeah. But Heche, who was just a teen back then, gave them such distinctive yet genuinely believable emotions that it was very quickly obvious that she had what it took to go the distance in the difficult industry she had chosen.
In a 2018 appearance on Harry Connick Jr.’s talk show, Heche said that she auditioned twice for “Another World” and wasn’t told until later why.
“Oh lordie, I did not,” she said when Connick asked if she knew the soap role was playing twins. “I was asked to audition twice, and then when I got hired, he said, ‘I asked you to audition twice because you’re gonna play twins.’”
And she played those twins so convincingly that she had some fans believing she was only playing one of them.
“Their reactions were kind of schizophrenic because I played twins and nobody believes that I was the same person playing the twins,” she recalled in a 1998 interview with Take2MarkTV. “So some people just hated me and some people really loved me, which was so funny that I fooled them. And then some of them wouldn’t believe me when I actually said it was the same person and they wanted to figure out which twin I was.”
“I would do 60 pages of dialogue a day between the two of them,” Heche told Michael Fairman of her time on “Another World.” “That really trained me. That has benefited me more than anything I could possibly say. I wear it with a badge of honor. The work that I did on ‘Another World’ trained me for every single thing that I do, from spontaneity to craft to memorization to camera work to a split screen, which we did with Vicky and Marley which is one of the first times it was done. Now everybody can do anything that they want with blue screen every day. We didn’t have [that].”
Watch the clip at the top for a look at the 1991 scene when Marley, who was leaving for Switzerland, said goodbye to Vicky.
