OLTL/GH’S ex-starr/ GH’S ex-kiki
Kristen Alderson is grateful to have grown up on daytime.
It’ll be five years in January, which is so bizarro,” says Kristen Alderson of her surprise decision to exit GH back in 2015. A daytime mainstay since she was cast as Starr on ONE LIFE TO LIVE at the tender age of 6 back in 1998, the actress notes, “It had been 18 straight years of me being on a soap opera. It was a crazy decision. I don’t know what came over me, but it was like an Oprah ‘Aha!’ moment, like, ‘This is my time to go.’ ”
A desire to nurture her life away from work prompted the choice, she explains. “[GH] wanted me to stay for three more years and I was fully ready to sign up. But my mom and brother had just moved back to Philly,” where Alderson was born and raised, “and I started to worry, like, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to deal with not having any family out here.’ And there were things going on back home that I didn’t want to miss out on — like, my cousin’s daughter had just been born and I wanted to watch her grow up, and my friends got shore houses over the summer, and I was like, ‘Okay, in three years, they’re, like, going to be getting engaged. That might not be there for me in three years.’ I really needed to take that time to live, like, a normal life, to kind of live through things that I knew wouldn’t be there later. I just followed my gut.”
She has no regrets. “I really am happy that I made that decision,” she says. “I get that question a lot and people are really confused when they ask me, ‘Would you come back to a soap?’ and I say yes, because of course I would! I didn’t leave hating the genre of soaps. I have always loved soaps. I always loved my job. I left because it had been 18 years and I hadn’t really explored any sort of other parts of my life. And thank God, because my brother [Eddie Alderson, ex-matthew, OLTL] got diagnosed in that time [with Hodgkin’s lymphoma], my dog that we had for 19 years passed away and I was home with my family when it happened. I helped my mom put my grandmom in a nursing home, which was so hard on my mom. I had a shore house with my friends two summers in a row. I mean, the list goes on and on. I can’t imagine if I had missed out on those things.”
As much as life away from daytime agrees with her, Alderson cherishes her memories from her soap years. “When I talk about ONE LIFE TO LIVE, some people are like, ‘Oh, God, it was just your job, relax.’ But it wasn’t. That was our family. That was everything. We were there all the time; we lived a second life within our own life and it’s so hard to disconnect the two.”
Her grief over the show’s cancellation in 2011 was
tempered by how quickly she secured her next gig: reprising Starr on GH early the next year. “When Frank [Valentini, who became GH’S executive producer after holding that title at OLTL] came to me and asked me if I would be on GENERAL HOSPITAL, I was elated. Especially because over the years, we had done Super Soap Weekends and so many events with different GENERAL HOSPITAL actors and because they lived out in L.A., us New York soap opera people were like, ‘Ohhh, L.A., they’re so cool, they’re on the dark and mysterious show.’ Like GH was for the cool kids, kind of. So I was just always like, ‘I can’t even imagine how cool it would be to be on GENERAL HOSPITAL!’ I was so excited.”
She made the move to GH along with several other OLTL expats, including Depaiva, Roger Howarth (ex-todd, now Franco) and Michael Easton (ex-john, now Finn). “That helped so much,” she nods. “At a time when there were so many new surroundings, it helped to have familiar faces and people who were going through the same things I was. And then Chad [Duell, Michael, her GH love interest] was so insanely welcoming and we just instantly clicked; we were like best friends from the second I started. We had that fun, easygoing friendship that really helped make that transition easy, as well.”
Their camaraderie led to real-life romance, but the couple split after Alderson decided to head back East. They remain on good terms. “When we ended things, we didn’t end things in a mean way or a nasty way. I had been toying with the idea of coming back to Philly for a while and that was really hard on us, and there were just other things in the relationship where we realized maybe we weren’t right for each other, which is obviously such a hard thing to realize when you care about someone so much. We were both like, ‘Oh, my
gosh, what if we can’t make this work?’ We never fought; we were never the types to scream at each other. We never had an argument the whole time we were together, like two-and-a-half or three years. We really ended things on a beautiful note. We prayed the day before I moved back to Philly, like, ‘I love you, we love each other; God, if we are meant to be, bring us back together, but if we’re not, please help us be happy with what our next adventure is.’ We have always had a good rapport ever since because nobody did anything wrong; it wasn’t like that. It was like as well as a breakup could go, really.”
Ensconced back in life in Philadelphia, Alderson continues to perform; she recently wrapped a run in the off-broadway musical The Marvelous Wonderettes and shot a short film that is she describes as “a sci-fi musical”, but when asked about her current relationship to acting as a profession, she chuckles, “That’s a good question! It is literally the hardest business ever. I have always said to anyone who wants to be an actor, ‘Find another job and be an actor on the side.’ I have an agent, I am just not auditioning; there is not really anything out there. It’s so slow lately and every actor that I talk to lately says the same thing, that they’re going through that. It’s really a tough time. I’m a big believer in things happening when they’re supposed to, so I try not to get too discouraged and in the meantime, I’ve just been babysitting my cousin’s babies and enjoying being with family and friends.”
She doesn’t rule out the possibility of moving again to further her career. “I wouldn’t mind living in New York again at some point,” she muses. “I would love to get back onto Broadway [she made her debut as Molly in Annie in 1997]; that’s a big goal of mine. And if GENERAL HOSPITAL or YOUNG AND RESTLESS reached out and said, ‘We want you on the show,’ I would go to L.A. in a heartbeat.” w
“I HAVE ALWAYS LOVED SOAPS. I ALWAYS LOVED MY JOB.”