| JUST THE FACTS: Birthdate: 2/2/55 Hometown: Grand Rapids, MI Children: Rachel, 10; Max, 5; Jake, 2 Favorite Place To Take The Kids: "Vasquez Rocks, a rock fountain in Santa Clarita Valley." If I Could Change One Thing I'd: "Change the color of my hair. I'd love to try and be a redhead, just to really freak people out." Most Surprising Skill: "I'm a board diver. I was an amateur competitive diver in high school." Most Dangerous Thing I Ever Did: "Act with Jordan Clarke (Billy, GL). I'd hit him and he wanted to hit me back." I'd Love To Be Stuck In An Elevator With: "Phyllis Diller and Sean Connery." I'd Hate To Be Stuck In An Elevator With: "Mr. Blackwell." Winning three Emmys means nothing when you want to break out of daytime TV. Ask Kim Zimmer, the actress who took the three gorgeous statuettes she received out to Hollywood and hit a brick wall. "The business end was very difficult for me," says the woman who made Reva Shayne Lewis of Guiding Light one of the most popular characterizations on soaps. "There's still a real stigma about daytime acting. And it was really hard to go from being a big fish in a little pond to just a little fish swimming around." Ultimately, Zimmer decided to dive back into the soap pond. She was primed to try soaps on the West Coast, anyway --- the woman likes to work --- and she couldn't resist the bait; a role created by the writer who put the sass and shimmy in Reva Shayne Lewis --- Pamela Long, who has created the role of Jodie Walker on Santa Barbara for Zimmer. "I could trust Pam to create a character that I knew was going to be dynamic and that I'd love playing," she explains. "Plus, the stuff that I was doing on the outside world in nighttime was fine, but none of it was artistically gratifying. I was having little pangs of wanting to go back. It's funny, because I remember talking to Deidre Hall (Marlena, Days Of Our Lives) backstage when we were on The Oprah Winfrey Show, and she said the same thing. We missed it," Zimmer reveals. Zimmer's agents were less than thrilled with her choice. "They were really on their way to some kind of nighttime career," she says. "My name was being bandied around for different projects. But I told them this is what I want to do. I'm happiest in this format." The ambitious star has put her dreams on the back burner --- for now --- but she seems to have a slight case of battle fatigue. Big-name contacts who had rolled out the red carpet for her stopped returning her phone calls. A classic example is what happened, or rather what didn't happen, between Zimmer and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, the creator of Designing Women and Evening Shade. Zimmer's bravura performance as an abused wife on Designing Women led to a series of auditions with Hal Holbrook in front of CBS brass for a new series that turned out to be Evening Shade --- but Zimmer was not signed for the pilot. "Hal and I auditioned for all these network people," she shares. "I was a real contender for it." Zimmer shrugs helplessly when asked what she thinks caused the sudden cold shoulder. "Honest to God, I don't know," she says. "Linda and I played phone tag for a while, but we never really hooked up. It was another real disappointing turn of events. I thought that I had her, and once I moved out here, there was nothing." Zimmer reveals that CBS network interference may have KO'd her chances on the show. "From what I understand, there was a comment made that they would have me back on daytime but not on nighttime," she says in an even voice. "I think that's a common attitude. Network executives would much rather woo a daytime star from another network." Yet when Zimmer tried her luck at other networks, she found herself in an aggravating catch-22. "I was an unknown to them," the multiple-award-winner states. "It really humbled me. Creatively, it was wonderful to be in that process of auditioning with the masses all over again. But when the film market shrinking, I was up for things with women like Christine Lahti and JoBeth Williams. You have a daytime person and a film person who's trying to move into nighttime...so who are they going to take? You'd think they'd take a daytime person because people in the outside world are more familiar with them than with many film actors. But the problem is in the minds of the executives." While some soap stars might have fought to revive the roles that made them famous, Zimmer claims that returning to GL was never an option. "First of all, Jill Farren Phelps took over the helm there, and she didn't really know me," the actress explains. "Her ideas of the show were without Reva, and that was a smart move. For so long, the show centered on Reva. Without that domineering character, a lot of other characters that had been back-burner have been pushed forward, which is great." And interestingly enough, if Zimmer ever did tackle Reva again, she says she'd prefer doing it without Pamela Long. "It would be better for me, honestly, to have a different head writer writing her," Zimmer says. "I think Pam and I did just about everything we could do with that character. It would take a new writer to develop different aspects of Reva." Another thing that has made the possibility of Zimmer's return to GL remote is the fact that she has no desire to move back to New York at the moment. She and her family are happily ensconced in Valencia, the home of Magic Mountain amusement park. "It's real easy living out here with children," Zimmer says. "And my husband isn't ready to go back East. He's a full professor at California Institute of the Arts, teaching acting and stage combat." Zimmer's relationship with her husband, actor/director A.C. Weary, is one of daytime's most durable. The couple met doing summer stock eighteen years ago; they married in 1981. "He is a really special human being," she says. "I'm normal in that I'm wild and crazy, and I don't know, I can't explain myself. But I can explain A.C. He's got such faith in our relationship that he can put up with me jumping into the sack with how many different men in daytime? Never been threatened by it. He's an incredible husband." Although they are still deeply in love, Zimmer acknowledges that, like any couple, they've experienced their share of rocky moments. Despite Weary's career as an actor and director, Zimmer has served as the main breadwinner throughout much of the marriage, and she frankly admits, "There was a time while I was doing GL that I got a little sick of it. I was working five days a week, the kids were all over me when I got home because they hadn't seen me all day, and there were demands being made on me to make public appearances. That was a rough time in our relationship because I was overextended. Finally, A.C. forced me to sit down and say what I wanted to give up. I said, 'Well, I can't give up the job; that's our mortgage payment, babe.' And I really did love the show too much to ever quit. I finally decided to stop saying yes to everything else and spend more time with my family." Zimmer's keeping these past lessons in mind as she plunges into her new role as Jodie Walker. "Jodie's more down-to-earth," Zimmer says. "She's got two teenage kids and has been married to the same man for twenty years, unlike Reva, who was married to every male member of one family. Jodie also does investigative work for the D.A.'s office. It's nice to play a character who isn't just floating around. They tried to get Reva jobs several times, and it never worked." Zimmer was stunned by the volatile response that greeted her mere arrival at SB. "My first piece of mail was from some woman writing to say that she wanted me to go back to GL because SB is Cruz and Eden, Cruz and Eden, Cruz and Eden," Zimmer reveals. "It was such a shock because I thought all my bad mail would be, 'How could you desert GL for SB?' I never in my life thought I'd be stepping on those toes." But neither fan threat's, nor the show's precarious ratings have deterred the unsinkable Zimmer. "I have every intention of staying on this show as Jodie Walker for the next ten to fifteen years," she declares emphatically. Kim Zimmer is certainly happy to be back home on daytime. In her own words, she's grown "older and wiser over the last couple of years. I appreciate what we have in daytime now. I think the quality of work is much higher than in nighttime. I think a lot of actors would agree that you don't know what it means to you, creatively as well as professionally, until you're away from it." Yet, there's still that lingering shadow of a doubt. "Now that I'm doing a soap again, it's really hard when I talk to friends and they say, 'My God, I just read for this great Diane English (creator of Murphy Brown) pilot and it looks real good,'" Zimmer admits wistfully. "I'm just happy being here, but there's still a big question mark in the sky: Could that have been my show? Is it the one I might have finally gotten? I think that's going to be something I have to live with for a long time." "KIM ZIMMER KEPT PINCHING MY BUTT," RECALLS A COLLEGE PAL: No one has ever accused Kim Zimmer of failing to make an impression. In the case of Russ Kupprian, her fellow theater major at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, Zimmer made an indelible black-and-blue impression --- on his rear end. The year was 1976; the show was a dance concert. Kupprian, Zimmer and seven other dancers were doing a jazz number to the theme of the movie Shaft. It seemed very hip at the time, recalls Kupprian. "I was the only male on stage, and for some reason, Kim and this other girl loved pinching my butt. I kept asking them to cut it out, but Kim would just giggle, tell me I had a cute butt and do it again." I was going home with black-and-blue marks on my rear, and my girlfriend finally said, 'Hey, what the hell is going on?' I shrugged and told her, 'Zimmer keeps pinching my butt, what can I do?'" "It was very clear to me that of all of the people I knew who were serious about pursuing their careers, Kim was really the one person who'd go on to do something major. It seemed to me that marriage and children were the farthest things from her mind. One night, I ended up hanging out at her apartment, and I asked her about that. She responded, 'No, I really want to get married and have kids,' and it changed my view of who she was. Her husband, A.C., whom I met when he did repertory theater with us at Hope College, is a wonderful guy and one of my favorite people to work with. One day, he told me that he thought Kim was the women he'd like to end up with, and I thought to myself, 'This is a picture-perfect romance in all ways. They're going to be true to each other and have a great marriage that'll last forever.'" |