Eileen Fulton, the actress who helped define the modern-day soap opera villain as Lisa Miller on As the World Turns, has died. She was 91.
Fulton passed away on July 14 in Asheville, North Carolina, following a period of declining health, her family shared in an obituary.
Recognized as daytime TV’s inaugural “bad girl,” Fulton played Lisa Miller from 1960 to the show’s conclusion in 2010, marking a remarkable 50-year tenure and solidifying her status as one of the longest-running soap actors in U.S. television.
The character of Lisa, initially crafted as a temporary “nice girl” role for actress Lois Smith, quickly transformed into a quintessential vixen. This evolution eventually led Fulton to be inducted into the Soap Opera Hall of Fame in 1998 and receive a Daytime Emmy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004.
Margaret Elizabeth McLarty was born on September 13, 1933, in Asheville. She was the daughter of a Methodist minister and a public school teacher. She earned a music degree from Greensboro College in 1956 and then made a daring move to New York City to pursue acting—a decision that was wholeheartedly supported by her parents.
She studied under some of the most legendary names in performance, including Sanford Meisner, Lee Strasberg, and Martha Graham, and made her feature film debut in 1960’s Girl of the Night.
Fulton was so booked and busy in her heyday that she appeared on As the World Turns — then broadcast live — while also performing in Broadway’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and the off-Broadway musical The Fantasticks at the same time.
A cabaret regular in both New York and L.A., Fulton also authored two autobiographies (How My World Turns and As My World Still Turns), wrote several murder-mystery novels, and even penned a book titled Soap Opera.
She retired in 2019 and returned to her roots in Black Mountain, North Carolina.
Fulton is survived by her brother, Charles Furman McLarty, niece Katherine Morris and their children, as well as sister-in-law Chris Page McLarty.
