Hart's Afire
(TV Guide. July 20-26, 2002)
Article by Michael Logan
Alicia Minshew was sitting at a Starbucks in New York City with her father when she got the call that she’d been cast as Susan Lucci’s daughter on All My Children. “I remember the moment well,” says the 28-year-old actress, “because I starting screaming into my cell phone ‘Are you f---ing kidding me?’ My dad had to control me.”
She had a good reason to be incredulous. Though Minshew won instant raves when she hit the ABC soap last January as Kendall Hart, the sassy, satanic spawn of Erica Kane, she had spent the previous five years in showbiz trying to get arrested. Oh, she landed a minor gig here and there. Kicking back in her dressing room at AMC, Minshew quickly lists them. She did the voice of Shannen Doherty on MTV’s Celebrity Death Match. She appeared in “Game Day,” an obscure 1999 Richard Lewis movie. “And,” she says, “I did so many feminine-hygiene commercials that my agent calls me Crotch Girl.”
Oddly, the glamour-puss – seemingly made for sexy drama – had a tough time cracking the soaps. She auditioned to play the dim-witted heiress Gwen on Passions (losing out, ironically, to Lucci’s real-life daughter, Liza Huber) and for several heroine roles on AMC that were too sweet to suit Minshew’s salty style. “Alicia has that marvelous look in her eye that spells trouble,” says AMC casting director Judy Blye Wilson. “I was sure we’d hire her someday, but I didn’t know it would be for the recast I most dreaded.”
Kendall, you see, was memorably put on the map by Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Sarah Michelle Gellar, who played the part from 1993 until ’95. (She and Lucci were rumored to hate each other, which Gellar pretty much confirmed upon her exit.) Lucci was not consulted about the return of Kendall and initially refused to be interviewed about Minshew, fueling speculation that her nose was out of joint. But these days she trumpets her new TV daughter as “terrific” and swears she always thought so. “I was only shown Alicia’s audition tape after [the casting] was a fait accompli, but I could see why they chose her,” Lucci says. “She was wonderful.”
Besides, Lucci knows a good thing. The long-running conflict between the two needy, self-obsessed, man-hungry characters is soap-opera lightning in a bottle, only now it’s more electric than ever. As played by the tiny, birdlike Gellar, Kendall was but a pipsqueak from hell. As played by the towering, take-no-prisoners Minshew, she’s downright lethal. (Kendall tried to get Erica sentenced for the murder and plied Bianca, Erica’s favored daughter, with booze and let her drive drunk.) “Kendall’s inner child comes out at the craziest moments,” chirps Minshew, looking on the bright side.
She was raised this way. Born in Plantation, Florida (she’s one of four daughters), Minshew describes her dad, Jim, and Episcopalian minister, and her mother, Lenore Hubbard, a fitness instructor, as “really open, happy people. They’re divorced but still best friends.” You want proof? “When my mom got remarried,” Minshew says, “my dad was the minister at the ceremony.”
Her own person life is just as rosy. Well, it is now. The actress lives with her beau, film editor Michael McKinney, but until recently she shared a pad with him, his brother and his brother’s friend. “I was a real saint because those boys were pigs,” she says. “When I got AMC, I said, ‘Guys, I’m on strike. I’m not cleaning up after you anymore. I’m on TV now.’”
Not that Minshew is letting fame go to her head. “I’ve got friends who’ve been at this longer than I have and still don’t even have an agent,” she says. “It took me a long time to get here, but I’m one of the lucky ones.”