Victoria Lord

Victoria Lord

Victoria "Viki" Lord (formerly Gordon, Riley, Burke, Buchanan, Carpenter, Davidson, and Banks) is the principal fictional character and matriarch of the Lord family on the ABC soap opera One Life to Live.

Created as the original plot device by series creator Agnes Nixon, Gillian Spencer was originally cast as Victoria, first appearing on the debut episode July 15, 1968. Nixon later recast her with Erika Slezak, who has since become synonymous with the character role. Slezak first appears as Victoria on the episode aired March 17, 1971, and played the character nearly continually throughout the series until the final episode aired January 13, 2012, becoming one of the most lauded and longest-serving actors in American soap operas.

The mainstay heroine figure of the serial, Victoria's storylines focus on drudgery, love, and family troubles. One of the longest-running characters on American daytime television, Viki weathers widowhood (three times), divorce (four times), a brain aneurysm, a near-death out-of-body experience (three times), being shot (two times), sent to jail, suffering a stroke, breast cancer, rape, a heart attack, heart disease, a heart transplant, the abduction of three of her five children as infants, the deaths of two siblings, and the death of her daughter from lupus. Most notably, she suffers recurring bouts with dissociative identity disorder throughout the show narrative.