Morgan Fairchild
A Timeless Icon of Grace and Advocacy
In this exclusive interview with The Eden Magazine, we sit down with the legendary Morgan Fairchild, a true icon of Hollywood whose career spans decades of unforgettable performances on screen and the stage. Beyond her undeniable talent and timeless beauty, Morgan is a passionate advocate for environmental and humanitarian causes. Join us as she reflects on her inspiring journey in Entertainment, her dedication to making a difference, and the values that continue to shape her remarkable life and career.
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From Texas to California, Were there any stops in between before settling in Los Angeles?
Yes. New York City. I moved to New York from Dallas, Texas, in the 1970s. My sister, who studied at Julliard Drama School, was the only person I knew there. I did know some friends with whom I had done theatre, but they were not close friends. I lived and worked there through most of the 70s and loved it. But when film and TV crews came to New York to shoot, they wanted New York types like Italian mamas and character types. The waspy blonde parts were being cast in Los Angeles. But still, I was fortunate to be cast and work on Search for Tomorrow and shows like Kojak, which were shooting in New York. I eventually moved to Los Angeles and got my first job in less than a month. I was very grateful for that. When good things are happening, you’re grateful. Then, as time passes, and you look back on the past and realize how fast everything happened early in your career, you’re extra grateful.
Over the years, did you spend much time returning to Dallas?
Yes. My parents and my sister were there. After my sister completed her studies at Julliard, she moved back to Dallas and then to Miami. When my parent’s health was failing, we would take turns going back there to take care of them.
Dallas has not been your home for a long time, but what still makes you a girl from Texas? And what makes you an LA woman?
What makes me a Texas girl is that Texas women always consider themselves frontier women. When I was growing up, I would stand tarantula and rattlesnake guard while my mother was doing the gardening. You take pride in being a little different from the rest of the country because it’s frontier.
What makes me an LA woman is simple: I love the glory of Los Angeles—the beautiful weather and the fun of the city. There’s an effervescence about it that makes me feel good.
How do you stay grounded, healthy, and optimistic?
I dealt with depression a lot when I was a kid. I was very shy and quiet, and I trained myself to be positive. I trained myself to say, “In the universal scheme of things, this doesn’t really matter.” Those words have gotten me through a lot by putting things into perspective that I will survive this, and life will go on. Whatever is happening, I pull myself together and go on. Again, that’s part of the Texas frontier woman attitude.
Tell me about your love for doing theatre and comedy.
I grew up in the theatre and have always respected what everybody does on any set I’m working on because I’ve done it all, from props to sound, lights, costumes, and more. Working in theatre teaches you all of that. It’s an excellent foundation for any serious actor.
Acting is a team effort, and everything is important to the end goal of a production. I’ve always approached the work that way. It’s essential to do your best, keep going, and always be considerate of others you work with.
Theatre is so different from film and TV in that you have instantaneous gratification. If you bomb, you bomb. If it works, it’s glorious. When you connect with an audience, it’s an incredible feeling, and you know it. I love doing comedy, entertaining, and making people laugh – there’s nothing like getting out there and getting a good laugh out of an audience. And as an actor on stage, you can’t fake comedy timing. It’s not the same as working in front of a camera for film or TV where you get to do multiple takes.
I have worked with some wonderful comedic giants. I got to do the first year of Mork & Mindy with Robin Williams. I did a TV movie with Joan Rivers, who was also a friend. I’ve done TV specials with everybody from comedy legends like Bob Hope and Rodney Dangerfield, and I also did Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure.
I did a short run of Butterflies Are Free this year in North Carolina. And someday soon, I would really like to do Lion in Winter and play Eleanor of Aquitaine.
If you hadn’t chosen an acting career, what career path would you have chosen?
I wanted to be a doctor or a paleontologist. I thought I’d be out in the Gobi Desert dusting off dinosaur bones. I also tried to keep my hand in with my love of Science.
That’s why I’ve been an environmental activist, talking about global warming since the mid-80s. At one point, when Al Gore was still a Senator, he and I were the only two people in DC talking about global warming.
One of my weird hobbies is emerging viruses and epidemiology. When AIDS first hit, I found that I was the only famous person who could go on shows like Nightline and explain what a retrovirus is and how you do and don’t get it. I did the first town hall on Nightline, which went on for five hours alongside doctors and congresspeople.
I felt a moral obligation to get out there and use the fame that I had to talk to people honestly about AIDS and try to get the stigma removed from the gay community. I testified before Congress to help get research funding and worked with Dr. Fauci and Dr. C. Everett Koop, surgeon general at the time under President Reagan. And I was there to unveil the first AIDS veterans wing in New York with Mayor Koch.
I’ve always had this weird hobby that nobody cared about until suddenly, there was this global AIDS pandemic. I felt it was my responsibility to help educate people. I have continued to try to do that with COVID, which everybody wants to think is over, but it’s not. Now, you see many people with long COVID. It’s a very disabling problem, not just for the United States but for many countries. It will be a significant economic destabilizer because people can’t return to the workforce in their prime years.
I’m seeing a lot of long COVID with cancer. I have three friends who have had long COVID and now have breast cancer, blood cancers, and heart attacks. My fiancé died of a heart attack from COVID last year. People don’t want to talk about it. I get teased a lot because I wear a mask everywhere I go. I will add that I don’t go to many places, which is okay. I’ve had a wonderful, interesting life. I’ve visited many places, traveled, and experienced some wonderful moments.I haven’t had COVID, and I don’t want to get it. I have seen what it has done to many people, including my late husband. For many, it’s not just a cold or the flu. It can cause severe neurological problems.
What do you say to people in denial about the vaccine?
For those who don’t believe in the vaccine and made up their mind about it, I don’t try to argue with them. Of course, it also depends on the circumstances. I will reach out to someone to see if they might be amenable to discussing vaccines in general because it’s important to know that vaccines save lives. For example, many don’t know that HPV causes cervical cancer, anal cancer, esophageal cancer, all these different cancers. Now, thanks to Science, there is an HPV vaccine. In some countries where they have done heavy promotion of the HPV vaccine, cervical cancer has been reduced to almost nothing.
Some things are coming along that are currently in the study phase for Long-COVID that scientists are hopeful about.
What inspired you early on to get involved in the AIDS cause?
Early on, it was a huge stigma to talk about AIDS or be involved in the cause. At that point in my career, when AIDS was coming to the forefront and raging, I was doing the TV show Falcon Crest. I had been Rock Hudson’s date to a Lifetime Achievement Awards about six to eight months before he went on Dynasty. Because I was already studying AIDS, as soon as I heard he wasn’t looking good, I knew exactly what it was.
Then, the fear mentally started, and I felt a moral obligation because I quickly realized I would be the only famous face to speak up and educate people. I wanted to get the word out, take the stigma off, try to get it treated as a disease, and get people to change their sex habits. And because, at the time, I was a big sex symbol, I felt I had to speak up and say, “Guys, you have got to change your sex habits.”
After my public support and involvement, suddenly, people didn’t want to have me in their homes. They didn’t want me around their kids. They didn’t want me eating off their plates because I was talking about AIDS. That’s when I could see who my real friends were. People didn’t say, “Tell me more about the disease.” They just cut me off. It was a very sad time. It was bad enough that I was losing friends to AIDS, but I was also losing friends to the stigma and their own fear. Looking back, I feel honored to have done what I did.
And what I discovered, again, being that Texas frontier woman, is that I was willing to take the hits. One of my friends, the publisher of one of the big tabloid magazines, called me up and said, “We want to do a photoshoot with a bunch of celebrities and call it ‘Hollywood Fights AIDS.’ Would you do it?” I said, “Sure.” He called me back several weeks later and said, “Thank you so much.” I said, “For what?” He said, “Everybody said no until you said yes. Then we got people to do it because you said yes.”
I realized that was another way I could help. I was willing to be out front and take the punches to do my part to make it safer for others to come up behind me and talk about it. I always believed they wrote me off the TV show Falcon Crest because of my outspokenness about AIDS. I know I lost work over it. At one point, I was doing theatre out of town. A group of us were having dinner, and a casting fellow from LA who had retired to that small town started crying at the table. He said, “Morgan, I know you lost work. I was in the casting rooms, and your name would come up, and they would say, ‘Oh, she’s too controversial with all that AIDS stuff.’ “I didn’t stand up for you. I’m so sorry. I apologize.”
I knew they hurt me in the business. But it’s the best thing I ever did with my life because I helped save lives at that time by educating people, helping get the research funding, getting everything going, trying to take the stigma off of it, and getting people to face reality. Because I’m a science nerd, I face reality. And you have to face reality when it comes to severe health crises and pandemics.
When I testified before Congress, one of the members of Congress was very snide. He said, “Ms. Fairchild, can you tell me how many of my straight, heterosexual, good Christian constituents are ever going to have to deal with this disease?” I said, “Sir, it is a disease. It does not respect gender or race or your district line. It’s a disease. It will affect your constituents.” That is the kind of attitude that existed back then.
I made a living as an actor, but I’ve always been a science nerd, and I like to think I played a small part in getting research and funding for AIDS. Science is a good thing. Science saves your life.
What needs to continue to be done to ensure that such an epidemic like AIDS or a pandemic like COVID-19 never returns?
There are always going to be epidemics and pandemics. That’s nature. As any good science researcher would have told us, we were overdue for a pandemic when COVID came along.
The H5N1 flu is getting ready to become an epidemic right now. They just got a new recombinant flu outbreak in Cambodia, and it’s also emerging around Europe.
What steps should the entertainment industry take to make a more positive impact on the environment?
I’ve been talking about the environment for 40 years. Writers and producers should be educating people. But this is best done by working messages and information into storylines in a way that can be entertaining so people don’t feel like they’re getting hit over the head with it.
When I started talking about the environment, I thought this would probably start cascading 30 years after I died. Instead, it’s happening while I’m still alive. We didn’t know the progression would be this fast because we didn’t understand its cascade effect when I first got involved. And we didn’t know the progression of how things would trigger other things to fail at the same time. I don’t want to see people die because of environment-related events.
You are also interested in counterterrorism?
Yes. One of my other hobbies is counterterrorism. I have followed terrorist groups since the 70s. I was at the RAND Corporation eight or 10 years ago. They used to do these weekend seminars where you had different panels on different topics spread out over three days, and could go to any of the panels.
Ten years ago, I was at a counterterrorism panel that Harry Brown was hosting. Present on the panel were Prince Turki Al-Faisal, the head of intelligence in Saudi Arabia at that time, David S. Rohde, who the Taliban had held hostage, a man named David Kilpatrick from Australia, and five or six others. It was a fascinating discussion on terrorism and counterterrorism.
The last question Harry phrased to them was, “Where are the new terrorist threats emerging?” Everybody was picking some new emerging group. Patrick Kilcullen, from Australia, piped up and said, “Global warming is going to be the new driver of terrorism as it forces displacement of people all over the world. Fighting for water will be the new oil.”
Harry Brown was saying what I’ve been saying for 40 years, so I went to him afterward and said, “Where have you been? We’re agreeing on all this.”
Seated next to me that day was an older gentleman with a cane. He never got up during the breaks, so I brought him back some coffee and cookies. He thanked me, and we started chatting.
I asked him what he thought about the global warming issue that Harry mentioned. He said, “Well, young lady, I don’t know about global warming, but I’ll tell you, I run some of the biggest insurance companies in this country, and we have to pay for everything, so I take it very seriously.”
We need to look at the destabilizing effects of global warming which impact property values and being able to get insurance. The hurricanes that recently hit Asheville and North Carolina have taken people’s lives literally, but also everything they owned.
When it happens repeatedly on large swaths of country and all countries simultaneously, with floods and fires, where will we go? Young people are inheriting this, and I feel bad for them.
The Pacific Air Stream, the Gulf Stream, and everything we’ve relied on with our oceans to regulate weather since we started recording is falling apart. The ocean has gotten so hot. Airstreams are getting more and more volatile. Scientists are scared about what’s going to happen.
What message would you like to share with those who look up to you for inspiration in both acting and activism?
With regards to my activism, the message I would like to share is that I believe in being a frontier woman, getting out and facing the issue, facing the problems, and then trying to defend what I think is right, whether it’s AIDS research, educating people about COVID, or whether it’s trying to educate people about democracy. You have to keep fighting for the planet and for people who can’t fight for themselves. You don’t say, “I’m going to hide under the covers.” You get out and fight.
With regard to acting, I would like to say that entertainment has always been important to every culture, even going back to cavemen and early tribes. There was the storytelling, the oral passing down of fables, and lessons learned, whether it’s Hans Christian Andersen with his fairy tales or tribal lore. Stories have always been essential to teaching young people the culture of right and wrong, setting good examples of doing the right thing. It’s always been there for every culture in the world. I am proud that I have played a part in telling stories to so many people through the countless roles I’ve played and the projects I have been involved in, whether through television, film, or theatre.
What moment in your professional career shaped your success?
There are many because there isn’t one pivotal moment when you’ve been doing this work as long as I have. But booking the soap opera Search For Tomorrow early in my career was a big break. Also, after years of doing theatre, coming out to Los Angeles, and getting that first job, that was another big break. Everything’s a big break each step of the way.
Tell us about your very first time on set.
At 16, I worked a lot in the theatre in Dallas. I was on my way to open a show called A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum when I got a call from a fellow who owned all the sound stages in Dallas. He knew me because I’d shot a lot of commercials there. He said, “You want to be in a movie? I said, “Sure.” He said, “Be at the North Park Inn at 5 AM tomorrow.” I said, “I’m opening a show tonight. I don’t know if I’ll be home by 5 AM and must go to high school sometime in between.” He said, “Well, that’s it.” I didn’t hesitate and told him I would be there at 5 a.m. Then, just as he was about to hang up the phone, he asked, “Oh, by the way, can you drive a stick shift?” I didn’t know how, but being an actor, I lied and said, “Of course.” When I got to the theatre for my show, I told my fellow actors that they had to take me out in the alley and show me how to drive a stick shift at intermission.
I got to the North Park Inn at 5 AM. Everybody was mulling around in the dark in this parking lot. They put us all on these big buses and took us to the middle of nowhere in Texas. After an hour’s drive, when we got out, it was still dark. This was my first movie, and I didn’t know a thing about being on a movie set. I turned to someone beside me and asked, “What do I do? Where should I go?” They said, “You should go look at the set.” I asked, “Where’s the set?” They pointed and said, “It’s down that road.” Then handed me a flashlight, and I started walking down this dirt road in the dark, heading towards the set, trying not to trip on anything along the way. As the sun was starting to rise, I saw this guy walking toward me with the sun behind him. I said, “Can you tell me where the set is?” He looked at me and said, “I’ll show you the set.” Well, it turns out that guy was none other than handsome Warren Beatty, and the movie he was starring in alongside Faye Dunaway, and that I would be working on, was Bonnie and Clyde.
Are there any actors you have worked with that you consider geniuses?
Robin Williams and Larry O’Dwyer! Larry is not a household name or as well-known as Robin, but he was a brilliant actor who worked a lot in different theatres nationwide.
What is the best professional advice you ever received?
Larry O’Dwyer was the one who gave me the best advice I ever received. He said, “You can always walk out on reality.” That has gotten me through so much. And he also said, “You create your own reality.”
And that’s what I’ve done. Those words mean you know who you are. You put one foot in front of the other. You exist in your reality. That’s what I’ve done, and it has stood me in excellent stead all these years.
You worked with the late Matthew Perry on Friends, playing his mother. Is there something you’d like to share about Matthew Perry, the person, not the actor?
When I was offered the part, the show wasn’t a big hit yet. But I’d seen the show and thought it had a lot of potential. so, I said yes and accepted the part. Cicely Tyson said, “You’re too young to play that guy’s mother. You shouldn’t do that.” I said, “Cicely, you have to make the transition at some point in your career.” I had played the mother of kids and teenagers and thought I’ve got to make that transition to playing the mother of a young adult. Cicely continued, “But you’re too young.” I said, “I will do the part because the show has potential.” And I went on to play Matthew’s (Chandler’s) mother.
A wonderful memory of Matthew is that it was my first day on the set. He came bouncing over to me like a big puppy dog and said, “You won’t remember me, but I used to hang out with you on the Flamingo Road and Falcon Crest set with my dad.” I asked, “Who’s your dad?” He said, “John Bennett Perry.” I said, “You’re John’s kid? You’re that little kid?” He said, “Yes.” I thought, “I guess I am old enough to be this kid’s mother.”
It was always fun to work with Matthew. I will always remember him as a sweet, adorable, creative, inventive man, actor, and master of the double and triple take.
Is there an upcoming project you want to tell us about?
I have a recurring part in General Hospital, playing the role of Haven de Havilland, the hostess of the home shopping show Home and Heart. Also, I was supposed to start shooting a movie with Loretta Switt and Michael Learned in September, but they keep doing rewrites. Hopefully, we’ll begin shooting in the new year.
What’s your guilty pleasure?
I love tapioca. I like the texture and the taste.
Is there a childhood memory you carry with you?
I had a really good childhood and have many beautiful memories. I’m just grateful that my sister and I are still very close. I remember the big Thanksgiving and Christmas get-togethers we used to have as a family. They were so special. Now, it’s down to a couple of cousins and my sister. As far as a specific childhood memory, one does come to mind. Fireflies. We had a lot of fireflies where I grew up. I love them. They are so beautiful. It makes me sad that they may soon be extinct.
Do you have some closing thoughts you’d like to share?
The main thing is that everybody should be kind to each other. Kindness is the most important thing in life. We should treat people with dignity and respect despite all the turbulent times we live in. After all, we’re all just here to help each other get through life. Reach out in love to your fellow men. Be gracious and kind to people and give them their dignity. Let love shine upon you. That’s it.
Special Thank you to:
Morgan Fairchild
Photo courtesy provided by Morgan Fairchild and ABC/General Hospital ©
JSquared Photography @j2pix (Photography)
Edward Hakopian (Hair and Makeup)
BeTrue Studio, Sharon Rajiman (Location)
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