The reel-world romance of Days of our Lives’ Julie Olson and Doug Williams begat a real-life, decades-spanning love affair between actors Susan Seaforth Hayes and Bill Hayes. Now, as then, art is poised to imitate life with Haye’s passing soon to be incorporated into the Peacock sudser.
Susan Seaforth Hayes Talks Doug Tribute And What Days of our Lives Means To Her
In an interview with Variety, Seaforth Hayes mused: “Being without Bill is quite a change. I really appreciate what the producers have done to honor him — to allow me to give pretty much the same eulogy [on the show for Doug] that I gave [Bill] at our church. I certainly didn’t expect that. He deserved to be lifted up, and I was so, so pleased that [his death] wasn’t just passed over as something that happened off-stage. It happens very much on stage, too. It was difficult to do, but not as difficult as living through it in life.”
Though the exact date of Doug’s death hasn’t been disclosed, nor the details surrounding the celebration of his life — save for the previously announced cavalcade of returnees — Seaforth Hayes is able to relay that, “They’re apparently putting together a lot of historical tapes around [Doug and Julie’s early days together].”
As for what DAYS means to her, Seaforth Hayes says: “[Bill and I] fell in love with each other in front of our viewers, and they knew it before we knew it. And our head writer Bill Bell, he knew it before we knew it. He scrapped all the story he had planned and wrote a story for us that was endless. So, I owe ‘Days of Our Lives’ my career, my happy marriage, my mother’s writing career. All of that is entangled.
“And then the fact that I got a Lifetime Achievement Emmy because we were survivors, and we were still crazy about each other. I don’t know. I do have an Emmy on the piano for Billy and for me, and that’s a wonderful thing.”
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