Donald May, Adam Drake on ‘The Edge of Night,’ Dies at 92
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Donald May, who spent a decade and more than 2,800 episodes portraying the crusading attorney Adam Drake on the CBS-ABC daytime soap opera The Edge of Night, has died. He was 92.
May died Friday at his home in Kent, New York, his wife, actress Carla Borelli, told The Hollywood Reporter. He had made great strides after suffering a major stroke about five years ago but was recently diagnosed with cancer of the larynx, she said.
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The handsome May also played newspaper reporter Pat Garrison on the 1960-62 ABC drama The Roaring 20’s, just one of the many gigs he landed on Warner Bros. TV shows early in his career.
The theater-trained May worked on the Monticello-set crime drama Edge of Night — a late-afternoon TV version of Perry Mason — from 1967-77, and he spoke every word on a 1968 episode in which Adam presented his closing argument while defending an innocent woman on trial for murder.
“Donald May as Adam flawlessly delivered forty-two pages of dialogue,” Christopher Schemering noted in 1985’s The Soap Opera Encyclopedia.
May also was one-half of an early daytime supercouple with Maeve McGuire, who played Nicole Travis, before his run on the show abruptly ended when Adam was gunned down from behind while sitting alone in his office.
“It was an attractive character, Adam Drake,” May told The Washington Post in a 1984 interview. “I found I could say through that character a lot of things I had a lot of thoughts about. If you’re on each day representing the current man — and that’s what the character represented — that was satisfying.”
He added: “Since so many people watched and apparently related to me, I felt a dual obligation — to my profession and to my audience. I had an obligation at least to keep up the character’s integrity.”
ABC /Courtesy Everett Collection
May was born in Chicago on Feb. 22, 1929, and raised in the Windy City and Houston. His father, Harry, was in the oil business.
He attended Shaker Heights High School and Western Reserve University in Cleveland, then graduated from the University of Oklahoma. After pursuing his master’s from Yale Drama School and a four-year stint in the U.S. Navy, he acted on stages across North America with the likes of Julie Harris and William Bendix.
He made his onscreen debut in the 1956-57 TV season when he played Cadet Lt. Charles C. Thompson and served as the narrator on the CBS anthology series West Point. (Gene Roddenberry wrote nine episodes that season.)
From 1959-62, May frequently showed up on Warner Bros. shows, guest-starring on Hawaiian Eye, Sugarfoot, 77 Sunset Strip, Cheyenne and Surfside 6 and replacing Wayde Preston as the lead on Colt .45 amid his turn as New York Record reporter Garrison on The Roaring 20’s, also starring Dorothy Provine.
After wrapping a day’s work on Edge of Night, he often worked on New York stages in the evenings.
In 1977 on Edge of Night, a producer told him that the next Monday was going to mark his final show. He said he was alone on the set with a cameraman and a soundman for his last scene.
“You’re sitting at the desk, the door opens, bam, bam into the bookcase. And that was it,” he said in a 2016 interview. “I had probably said or done everything that I could have done on the show. It wasn’t anger … Adam was through, finished.”
After Edge of Night, May played Grant Wheeler on the NBC soap Texas — a spinoff of Another World — and worked on other daytime serials including As the World Turns, One Life to Live and All My Children.
May also showed up on episodes of Combat!, The F.B.I., Fantasy Island, The Facts of Life, Dallas, Falcon Crest, Mama’s Family and L.A. Law and in films including The Crowded Sky (1960), A Tiger Walks (1964), Kisses for My President (1964), Follow Me, Boys! (1966) — Kirk Russell played him as a boy in that — and Robert Altman’s O.C. and Stiggs (1985).
He and Borelli were together since 1979. They played couples on Texas and O.C. and Stiggs, worked together on Falcon Crest and backed and performed at the now-defunct ATA theater company near the intersection of Hollywood and Vine.
Survivors also include his sons, Christopher (an actor on the Apple TV+ series The Afterparty) and Douglas.
