Elizabeth Harrower

Elizabeth Harrower’s IMDb biography is dramatic. According to IMDb, her mother died of the flu and her father had a nervous breakdown. Relatives passed infant Betty Louise Foss around, in part because of an alleged belief (that’s news to me) that babies somehow attracted the flu. She ended up in an orphanage, where she was eventually adopted by William and Jessie Harrower who, during the Depression, took her to Hollywood and tried to launch her career. None of this is on Wikipedia. Her birth name there is listed as Betty Louise Foss [citation needed]. So yeah, I don’t know.

She seems to have gotten her start in Christian drama, playing Woman of Samaria and Saint Lydia. And an unnamed character in “Does Christ Live In Your Home?” This was well after the Depression—in 1949, in fact, when Harrower had passed thirty. She acted steadily until 1974. Most of the stuff was standard TV, though there are a few movies scattered in there, ranging in quality from True Grit to Don’t Knock the Twist.

Why did she switch to writing instead? Lord, I don’t know; her Wikipedia article is barely more than a stub, and I don’t know how much I can trust her IMDb one. Her daughter, Susan Seaforth Hayes, was on Days of Our Lives at the time that Harrower became head writer. IMDb says it’s because she knew William J. Bell, believed to have written or contributed to some fifteen thousand episodes of soaps. He created Another World, for example, and he was credited on over eight thousand of both The Bold and the Beautiful and The Young and the Restless.

Harrower didn’t write anywhere near that many, but she did also have her lengthy acting career before she started writing. She still managed well over a thousand episodes herself. Consider that for a minute. Even given, you know, a writing room and all that, working on that many episodes is a hell of a career. And it’s soap operas; there is no such thing as a plot that’s too over-the-top. Harrower would have had to have kept coming up with ideas to keep it all interesting. It’s a crazy job, and clearly people liked how she did it.

Harrower did have one acting job after 1974. Specifically, four episodes of The Young and the Restless (for which she’d written a bit over four hundred episodes), wherein she played a drunken con artist named Charlotte Ramsay. It’s a nice little coda on her career. It was in 2003, twenty years after she’d left the show and ten years after she seems to have retired. And, again, thirty since she’d stopped acting. I didn’t see it, because I never watched The Young and the Restless, but it’s still a nice thought to let her do it.