R.I.P. Darlene Conley, Iconoclast

The passing of The Bold & The Beautiful’s Darlene Conley, who played the boozy, blousy Sally Spectra, robs soap operas of one of their last great female iconoclasts. Since Cady McClain used the term to describe her partner Hunt Block in her Emmy acceptance speech, I’ve come to think of iconoclasm in soap acting as a rarified status: Iconoclasts are actors who eschew the trappings of the genre and act, portray, behave however they damn please to suit the character and the scene. An iconoclastic performance is not exactly a great one, and vice versa – Erika Slezak, Susan Lucci, and Jerry verDorn are all great actors who pretty much follow the formula for soap opera performance.

In the past few years, most of the iconoclasts remaining in soaps have been men: General Hospital offers a pair of weirdos who defy categorization, Tony Geary and Maurice Benard, and Justin Deas spices up Guiding Light with off-the-cuff line readings. There are also some iconoclasts who I don’t think are really that good: Kin Shriner’s style is so baroque as to make him seem almost unprepared, and no one else on earth can do whatever it is that Drake Hogestyn does.

Iconoclastic women on soaps, however, have been few and far between. I think that has something to do with the traditional origins of the female-focused genre, and probably some inherent sexism in acting itself. As the male role in soaps has evolved over the last forty years, they’ve been able to get away with more (just as, in movies, the juiciest parts still go to men), but somehow we still expect our soap women to behave in a certain way – steely, flighty, sexy, but not too off the wall.

In large part, the female iconoclasts play roles we’re not supposed to think of as heroic or even sexy. They’re often older, maybe they’ve gained a few pounds, and if they’re not single they’ve at least stopped having bedroom scenes. Conley's Sally could have gotten her hair done by One Life to Live’s exiting Ilene Kristen, who is fabulous as screwball Roxy. And As the World Turns’ Elizabeth Hubbard makes Lucinda Walsh fascinating as she seems to pluck each subsequent line of dialogue out of the air in front of her. But there are a couple of lead female titans in the group, principally Kim Zimmer, as Guiding Light’s Reva Shayne, and Darlene Conley’s sparring partner, Susan Flannery, as B&B’s Stephanie Forrester.

Reva, like Erica Kane, is an outsized personality, but unlike Susan Lucci’s more traditional and mannered portrayal of the diva, Zimmer lets herself hang out there. Reva doesn’t care if one day she happens to look fat, or ugly – she is who she is, and screw you for saying so. As Reva wears her heart on her sleeve, Zimmer is an open book. Her every emotion, however inappropriate, is there on her face for us to see. She laughs and cries at moments in scenes you know weren’t scripted, and sometimes we actually see Reva eat—another taboo broken. Reva is probably the most real, complete female character currently on daytime television, and that’s due to Zimmer’s fierce and fearless performance.

Which brings us to the women of The Bold & The Beautiful. For my money, Flannery and Conley are the representatives of the first half of that title, as they have more balls than any of the men. Flannery’s Stephanie is the female version of the classic soap patriarch. Like Asa Buchanan or Alan Spaulding, she holds the purse and the puppet strings, and imposes her will on those who would otherwise hurt her family. While Stephanie has always been powerful, Flannery has allowed her, over the years, to become less glamorous. Gone are the blond locks, and gone are the wigs that, for a time, replaced them; confident Steph has gone gray and doesn’t care who knows it. At a time when soap opera women are undergoing a myriad of procedures in order to stave off the effects of aging, Flannery has embraced her appearance, and as such, we see Stephanie as that much stronger and sure of herself.

And while I know that B&B fans love a good Steph/Brooke smackdown, for my money the real title matches were between Stephanie and Sally. Maybe it’s because, in relief to Stephanie’s simplicity, Darlene Conley made Sally overly sophisticated: She dolled up, put on too much makeup, and was unashamedly still a redhead at 70. She met Flannery’s steely gazes with a titanic bluster. We won’t soon forget that deep voice, rising in indignation, emphasizing the wrong words in a line just because she could. And like many of her fellow iconoclasts, Conley did not concern herself overmuch with Sally’s sexuality. Conley/Spectra knew that the days of romance were behind her, and enjoyed imparting her own learned wisdom so that the younger set could have their fun.

Conley was truly a member of a rare breed. They don’t make them – nor do they hire them – like her anymore, which is the real shame: In order to evolve, daytime could use a few more iconoclasts, pounding on the barrier of tradition in order to see what else could be discovered.

Demo-hungry soap executives would have called Conley old; I thought of her as something new.