'Naughty' Daytime Star Susan Lucci: 'I Don't Feel My Age'

The 'queen of daytime TV' shares the joys of playing “naughty” Erica Kane, spoiling her grandchildren and the telling women to listen to their heart when it comes to their health.

If you’ve caught an episode of All My Children, you’ve seen Susan Lucci in her element. The Emmy award-winning actress is known for portraying Erica Kane on the series for the show’s entire 41 years. “Erica was the bad girl in town, the naughty girl, the pot stirrer,” says Lucci, 76. Playing her, she says, was one of the best times of her life. “I never thought that the audience was going to love her as much as I did,” she says. But they did: The soap garnered devoted fans from across the nation, with Lucci’s notorious character becoming one of the genre’s most beloved roles of all time. She spoke with Parade about her years as Erica Kane and how she coped with a dangerous heart blockage that nearly killed her.

An Audition That Would Change Her Life

Lucci grew up on Long Island, New York, the daughter of an American-Italian father and Swedish mother. As a child, she admits to being painfully shy. But one summer day, her mother shooed her outdoors, encouraging her to play with the neighborhood kids. “The first time they knocked me off my tricycle. I ran home crying, but I went out again,” she recalls.

Then, she discovered television. “I was the first one up in the morning and I would turn the TV on and watch all kinds of stuff,” she says. At night, she would lie in the hall outside of her parents’ bedroom, sneaking glances at the reflection of the TV on the far wall. “I saw a lot of stuff I probably shouldn't have seen,” she says. She remembers being 3 or 4 years old and thinking, I don't want to be watching. I want to be doing that.

Before she knew it, she was blasting her parents’ Broadway cast albums, wrapping herself in her mom’s scarves to look like Grace Kelly and acting out scenes with those neighborhood friends. She went on to study drama at Marymount College in Tarrytown, N.Y., and one day in 1969, Lucci found herself at the audition that would change her life. All My Children was calling to her. And they called her a lot.

“There were five callbacks,” recalls Lucci, who had gotten used to being told that she didn’t have the looks for television. People in the business would say to her, “If you only had blue eyes, if you had dark eyes but you had blonde hair, if you weren’t so ethnic looking,” she says. But on that humid day in New York City, the young actress tied a scarf around her head to tame her curls and met with casting directors. The show’s creator, Agnes Nixon, took a chance on the hopeful star, who admitted she wasn’t sure at first if she should accept the part. “I had to sign a four-year contract and I thought that was a big commitment. Four years is the length of high school, the length of college!” she says. But after an eight-page audition scene with Frances Heflin, who portrayed her mother Mona on the show, Lucci was hooked.

“There was so much about Erica that an actress could sink her teeth into,” she says. “The character was unpredictable, so to dive into that and find out what made her tick was really fun for me.” Lucci, who was 23 at the time, was also thrilled to portray a teenager in her natural element on television. “And at that time, teenagers didn't have a major storyline; they were always sent out of the room to go do their homework or something like that while the grownups talked,” she says. “But [All My Children] had full storylines around us and introduced humor, comedy and glamour. And I got to be the character the show told a lot of those stories through.”

A Star Is Born

The fandom behind the show reached a level Lucci had never dreamt about. She was nominated for an Emmy in 1978 and 19 nominations later finally won the Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series in 1989. She knew that night that she wasn’t going to win…again. But her seatmate, Rosie O’Donnell, quelled her doubts. “She said, ‘Let me take your evening bag because when you go up there, you'll probably step on it,” Lucci recalls. Indeed her name was called and she would go on to be nominated two more times, for a total of 21 nominations.

“Winning is much better than not winning,” she says with a smile, hopping out of the Zoom frame to grab her Emmy off her living room mantel and proudly show it off. “I was surprised how heavy they are,” she says, with a grin and the disclosure that after winning it, she took it to every interview she did that year.

Her string of consecutive losses wasn’t forgotten, though, and has resulted in her being spoofed on Saturday Night Live and having people refer to themselves as “The Susan Lucci of” when they found themselves losing. She found the spoofing comical, she said, and then was flattered when Martin Scorsese once said, “I’m the Susan Lucci of the Oscars.”

But all good things come to an end and in 2009 there were rumblings the show was getting expensive, and the cast moved to Los Angeles for more economical filming. Then in 2011, while Lucci was in the middle of a book tour for her bestselling memoir All My Life (fans would line up for hours to meet her), she was told that All My Children was coming to an end. “That was a very bitter pill to swallow and we all went into a mourning period, disbelief and denial and anger,” says Lucci. The fans, she shares, crashed the phone lines and computers at ABC demanding the studio execs reverse their decision. “There was a menu of numbers you could call, and you would hear the recording ‘if you are calling to protest the canceling of All My Children, press one. For all other ABC business, press whatever…’”

Will All My Children ever come back? In recent years, there have been rumblings of a spinoff, titled Pine Valley, shepherded by previous cast members Kelly Rippa and Mark Conseulos. “If it does go, I know I'd be in good hands again,” says Lucci who says she’d absolutely consider revisiting Erica.

A Scary Wakeup Call

In 2018, Lucci experienced recurring chest pain that eventually landed her in the ER and learned she had a 95 percent blockage in the main artery of her heart and a 75 percent blockage in the adjacent artery. She was taken in immediately for surgery and had two stents placed into her heart. “The nurses said if you had not come in, there is no question you would not be here today; you would have had the heart attack called the Windowmaker. That's how serious it was.”

Lucci, who had always assumed she had good genes (her mother lived to 104), found she had calcium buildup in her arteries, something that could have come from her father’s side of the family. She phoned her publicist on the way home from the hospital, desperate to figure out how to get the word out to women that they need to prioritize themselves, take their symptoms seriously and realize that unlike men—who predominantly experience chest pain with a heart attack—women can have entirely different symptoms like jaw pain and nausea. She’s a proud national ambassador for the American Heart Association, sharing the story of how her healthy diet of salmon and kale, plus her near daily Pilates habit, wasn’t enough to combat her family history. She had a third stent put in in 2022.

“Without sounding corny,” she says, she had been praying for a way to do something meaningful with her platform. “I didn't know it was going to mean almost having a heart attack that would kill me!” she says. She lost her husband of 53 years, Helmut Huber, who was 84, to a stroke in 2022 and is also planning to do some work to raise awareness about atrial fibrillation. “It’s been nine months and there aren’t words to say how much I miss him,” she says. Huber, a TV producer whom she married in 1969, was the great love of her life, she says. “He was my rock. It was a great marriage. I was kissing all those guys and he would take so much ribbing from his friends, but he was very secure and had a sense of humor and was always right there, telling me, ‘oh, honey you can do this with two hands tied behind your back.’”

Age Is Just a Number

Age has certainly not shown on the outside of Lucci, who is famously asked, “How do you look so young?” Her secret, she says, is a lot of discipline—staying hydrated, being sun smart and focusing on posture. After competing on Dancing With the Stars in 2008, she learned to “let your power come from your core.” And the chorus boys at Radio City Music Hall, she says, taught her to “walk as if your legs begin right from your ribcage. Oh, it makes you feel like you have the longest legs in the whole wide world,” she says.

These days, the resident of Garden City, NY (for more than 50 years!) has been leaning into being a grandmother. She has two children who both have children whom she dotes on. “I'm trying to spoil them. I have to follow the desires of their parents…but I have plans,” she says with a grin. After she turned 75 last year, she has learned to not get fixated on being in her 70s. “I don't feel my age,” she says, revealing that when she turned 60, she called her mother. “I was having trouble with the number and I asked, ‘mom how do you do this?’ There was a pause and my mother said, ‘Well, I just don't think about it.’ And I thought that's probably good. Just live your life, be who you are and don’t let it get you down.”

Lucci's Loves

Susan Lucci's favorite meal

Italian food hands down. Veal meatballs, some pasta, I'm there.

Everyday health ritual

Drinking hot water with lemon and fresh ginger. It boosts your metabolism, balances your pH and hydrates you at the same time.

On a Sunday, you’ll find me

Having an extra cup of coffee. I love coffee.

A character I wish I’d played

Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Someone in the entertainment industry I look up to

Jessica Chastain and Meryl Streep are amazing actresses. I admire Amal Clooney as a woman and for beauty and style.

Someone I’d love to act with 

Martin Short

What I’m watching 

My husband and I loved Yellowstone. And I’m late to the party but I just discovered Law & Order. Every episode is so well done.

Most embarrassing moment

Wearing a knit pantsuit in the '70s that started unraveling as I was walking through Penn Station!

Favorite quote

I saw one just a couple of days ago: “Whoever survives a test, whatever that may be, must tell his story. It's a duty.” That’s from Elie Wiesel. He survived quite a test with the Holocaust.

What I’m reading

The Maze by Nelson DeMille.