Gloria Loring - Career

Career

Loring began her music career at age 14, singing with a folk group known as "Those Four". Gloria Loring released her first album in 1968. It was titled "Gloria Loring, Today" on MGM Records. She went on to perform on a wide range of television shows in the 70's, from The Carol Burnett Show to the Academy Awards ceremony.

In 1979 and 1980, Loring and then husband Alan Thicke co-composed the theme songs to Diff'rent Strokes and The Facts of Life. The first season of Facts had the cast performing the theme, but the remainder of the run (1980–1988) featured Loring's rendition of the song. There were two versions of the Facts of Life theme song that Loring sang. One version was used from seasons two through six, and a second was used from seasons seven to nine.

Her son Brennan was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes in 1979. A year later, she joined Days of Our Lives and got the idea to create and self-publish the Days Of Our Lives Celebrity Cookbook to raise money for diabetes research. Volume One was published in 1981 and the followup Volume Two in 1983. The cookbooks, along with her recording "A Shot in the Dark", raised more than one million dollars for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation ("JDRF"). She followed that success with three commercially published books, Kids, Food and Diabetes, Parenting a Child with Diabetes, and Living with Type 2 Diabetes: Moving Past the Fear. For the past 30 years, she has served as a spokesperson for JDRF.

In 1980, when Loring joined the NBC daytime soap Days of Our Lives as chanteuse Liz Chandler, the show was going through a dry spell at the time, with many veterans dropped and many new faces alienating longtime fans. Of the nine new characters introduced in the 1980-1981 season, only Liz garnered a fan following, and was the only one to have her contract renewed. For three years, Loring dated Don Diamont, the actor who played the corrupt, long-lost son of her TV husband Dr. Neil Curtis. (Diamont went on to find daytime stardom on The Young and the Restless as Brad Carlton.)

In 1986, Loring scored a #2 Pop and #1 Adult Contemporary hit record in the United States with "Friends and Lovers", with Carl Anderson (also a #1 Country hit in 1986 for Eddie Rabbitt and Juice Newton under the title "Both to Each Other"). Loring originally performed "Friends and Lovers" on Days of Our Lives more than a year before the track finally hit the charts. Her performance of the song generated the largest mail response of any song in NBC daytime history. First recorded as a duet with Anderson (who appeared on Days of Our Lives to sing the song with Loring) in 1985, legal complications delayed its release as a single for a year. Loring left Days in 1986 and made sporadic film and television appearances over the next few decades. Her main efforts were spent in theater and in her recording career (though "Friends and Lovers" was her only major hit single).

In 2003 Loring released her first holiday album, You Make It Christmas. In 2008 she released A Playlist, which included a new recording of the song "Friends and Lovers" with Carl Anderson, recorded one year before he died.

Gloria’s new book, Coincidence Is God's Way of Remaining Anonymous, is a spiritual autobiography of how a series of extraordinary coincidences transformed her life. It was released October, 2012 by HCI, Inc., publisher of the original Chicken Soup for the Soul series.