Thanks for the Memories- AMC's Maria Gets her Memory Back at Long Last. Can a Reunion with Edmund Be Far Behind? (SOD 5/20/03)

Eva La Rue has been back on AMC just shy of a year. But Maria Santos Grey, the character she made a fan favorite from 1993-97, has remained MIA- until now. Yep, you heard it here first: The time has come to say goodbye to Maureen S. Gorman. The real Maria is (finally) ready to stand up.

Lets review: Once upon a time there was a beautiful and kind-hearted neurosurgeon (Maria) whose fairy-tale romance with a dashing journalist (Edmund) came crashing down, literally, when an airplane disaster left her presumed dead in 1997. Last summer, Edmund's fondest wish came true: Maria turned up at Wildwind very much alive. But their reunion didn't exactly go as he had hoped. It was bad enough that she had amnesia (a pesky side effect of an unapproved elixir David gave her following the crash): it was worse that she decided she didn't even want her memory to return. Eventually, Edmund accepted that the Maria he knew and loved was lost to him, most likely forever. Maureen (as Maria now called herself) gave her heart to Aidan, while Edmund began squiring the comely Mia around town.

This summary is particularly noteworthy for what hasn't happened yet: Maria hasn't gotten her memory back, and save for a few flirtatious moments, the Edmund/Maria love story has not truly picked up where it left off six years ago. Of course, before there can be an Edmund/Maria redux, there has to be a Maria. And though "Maureen" has had occassional flashes to incidents from Maria's life, none have been accompanied by emotional memories, memories of what it was like to be Maria- and to be in love with Edmund. But this week, that all changes.

And you'd be hard-pressed to find an individual more excited about this development than her portrayer, Eva La Rue, who exults, "Oh, Lord, have I been waiting for this!" The actress freely admits that said wait wasn't easy. "It was killing me to go to work and play this person," she groans. "Maureen wasn't just an amnesiac- she was a freakin' schizophrenic! Day to day, she was hating David, she was liking David, she was asking him for advice, she was telling him to go to hell, she was thinking of getting back together with Edmund, then all of a sudden she was running off to th Bahamas with Aidan. It has been," she says, "the toughest eight months of my working life."

The problem, in La Rue's view, is that "the story was just not there. It's nobody's fault; we were having such a big changeover [in writers] at the time, and everybody was trying to get their legs. But that's what the audience wants to see: the love story. Aidan and Maria were thrown together. I think they could have had a shot if it had been written slowly and properly; when it's not written slowly and properly, the audience revolts. They say, 'No way. I'm not going with you on that ride.'"

But that was then, and this is now. "If anything could restore the audience's faith, this storyline is it," La Rue proclaims. "This is what fans have been holding out hope for. It's the most excited I've been about a storyline since I came back. The writing has been great: everything about it has been well-done. It's a big 'Woo-hoo' all the way around. All of us involved in the storyline are like, 'Thank God! There's water in the desert!' We're all excited!"