Where The Heart Is (1969 TV Series) - Cast

Cast

Where the Heart Is boasted a large cast of performers, many of whom later appeared on Ryan’s Hope, which was created by Where the Heart Is' final head writers Claire Labine and Paul Avila Mayer. These included: Louise Shaffer (Rae Woodard), Diana van der Vlis (Nell Beaulac/Sherry Rowan), Robyn Millan (Delia Reid Ryan Coleridge #2), Roy Poole (Neil MacCurtain), Gregory Abels (Art Thompson), and Keith Charles (Homer Dowd). On the production side, many who worked on Where the Heart Is were later responsible for finally making a major success out of the long-running ABC serial General Hospital. Both Margaret DePriest and Pat Falken Smith were members of GH’s writing staff, as well as those who helmed it, in various periods during its glory years of the late 1970s and 1980s. Claire Labine would later be a GH head writer during the show's renaissance era in the 1990s. The connection of Where the Heart Is to Ryan's Hope continues with the fact that Pat Falken Smith, in between her stints at General Hospital, served as RH's head writer from 1983 to 1985.

Heart’s most prominent daytime alumnus was the late James Mitchell, (Julian Hathaway) who in 2008 celebrated twenty-nine years as All My Children’s Palmer Cortlandt. Another famous alumna was the late Rue McClanahan, (Margaret Jardin) who went on to bigger fame in Maude playing Maude Findlay's scatterbrained friend, Vivian Cavender Harmon; and later reteamed with Bea Arthur on The Golden Girls, where she played the lusty Blanche Devereaux.

Another alumna was actress Priscilla Pointer (Adrienne Harris Rainey) who went on to play Rebecca Wentworth, the long lost mother of Cliff Barnes and Pam Ewing on the long-running television series Dallas. After the show went off the air, Bibi Osterwald, who played the Hathaway family's cranky housekeeper, Stella, played David Birney's mother, Sophie Steinberg on the short-lived sitcom Bridget Loves Bernie.