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Above: On the cover of the June 26, 2007 issue of Soap Opera Digest.
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Love In The Afternoon
Suds Stud Thorsten Kaye of One Life to Live dishes about life as a big-time soap star
Montgomery Journal
by Janet Whitmor, Published August 21, 1996
Prepare to swoon, ladies: Soap star Thorsten Kaye is as suave and debonair as his charming Patrick.
It's 10:00 a.m. on the set of One Life to Live. Do you know where your hunk is? Actress Kassie Wesley DePaiva, who plays the scheming Blair, sure knows. She's wrapped around him - literally - in one of those famous soap opera clinch scenes.
DePaiva must wind her legs around Thorsten Kaye, the most exciting thing to happen to daytime TV since Tony Geary. He must hoist her onto a stair railing where they will smooch it up in the name of a day's work.
"I'm gonna have to take a cold shower," DePaiva says. It's not a line in the script. Another take. He lifts her. She nearly kicks him. In a bad place. "I'm afraid I'll kick him right in the groin," DePaiva laments.
"Love sometimes hurts," Kaye says in his good-natured way.
How hot is Thorsten Kaye? Bags of mail and homemade gifts line his dressing room. The Irish folk group the Chieftains are fans of the soap and guest-starred on the show July 30 to play his love theme, "Song Without End." There's a national write-in poll asking which woman he should end up with on the show.
But back off, ladies. Rumor has it that Kaye and Susan Haskill (sic), who plays Marty Saybrook (sic), his true love on the show, are an item in real life as well. But Kaye won't confirm or deny it.
"Women come up to me now and go, 'How about you and I? I think it could work out,'" he says, now seated in his dressing room, where he's nursing a summer cold.
Ah, fame. Kaye, 30, can't get used to people screaming for Patrick Thornhart, a literature professor, acting teacher and poet who was peacefully living in Ireland when his girlfriend was murdered by Irish Republican Army (sic!) terrorists. (Don't you hate when that happens?) Soon he was stalked, shot and nearly drowned. Alas, he had time for amour, but true love Marty is married to another guy at the moment. Hence one of the most popular love triangles today: Marty, Dylan (her sappy country lunk hubby, now paralyzed) and Patrick.
"[Patrick] is a Renaissance man, " Kaye says. "He's a romantic, well-educated man who loves with his heart and not his head. He understands the poetry of love. He is a man who loves only one woman and will wait for her."
In some ways, Kaye is like Patrick. "I love fantasy," he tells you, even though you are oblivious to his charms - well, sort of, if he would only stop looking at you so intensely. "I was born in the wrong time, anyway. I would have loved to have lived in the 1400s."
"I would have been fighting everybody with a big sword. I would have had an earring and a cool costume. Mostly I just love the romance of that time."
Ask him about having chemistry with soap actresses and he looks at you, leans in and says, "What do you think chemistry means? Do you know how you're looking at me right now? We're having a connection. That's chemistry."
This guy is good.
Kaye grew up in England where his father was an employee of General Motors. At 18, he made a beeline for the States; he studied Shakespeare at United States International University in San Diego and the Hilberry Repertory Theater in Detroit. He got his master's degree from Wayne State University and played all the classics.
During his spare time, Kaye rides motorcycles, plays pool and brushes up on the classics. Marriage? Kids? "You know I see myself as a dad, but I don't know if I could be a husband... I don't have a problem with one woman. The idea of having to stay all the time would be hard for me. If I feel the urge to go, I usually do it." He shrugs. "Maybe in five years I'll feel differently."
Kaye says he will do two years on the show and then leave the soap for good. "I want this to be like a play and have an end," he says. "Someday I'd love to go back to teach drama at college. I don't think I'm a soap actor for life."
But he is a soap actor now, and back on the set, DePaiva's conniving Blair is trying to console poor Patrick. DePaiva wraps her legs around him for the millionth time and he lifts her onto the railing. She holds onto his hunky shoulders, he proceeds to kiss her on the neck.
DePaiva suddenly looks pained, not full of passion. "This banister is killing my butt," she announces.
To the woman who almost accidentally kicked him where it counts, he smiles his most charming grin and reminds her, "Love hurts."