-Just Call Her Kate, SOW 1997?
-Catching Up with Finola Hughes, either SOM or SOW 1997?
-Keeping Track, SID 1998?
-A Ghost of a Chance, SID 4/20/99

Just Call her Kate (by MM, SOW 1997?)

Catching Up With Finola Hughes (by Robyn Flans, either SOM or SOW, 1997?)
"When asked if she's experienced any personal milestones, Finola Hughes (ex-Anna, GH) responds quickly:  'I'm a Disney character now.'  And she's not kidding.  On Aug. 25, Disney will release exclusively on home video Pocahontas II:  Jouney to a New World, in which Hughes is the voice of Queen Anne.  The animated feature is set in 1612, as King James rules England with Queen Anne beside him on the throne.
     Over two years ago, when Disney asked Hughes to play the part, she leapt at the opportunity.  'The voice is recorded first,' she explains.  'Disney is very particular about the sound they want for a character.  They have the character in mind and they know the role she played in story.  This character was very warm and had a slightly higher voice than mine.  You have to play around and try different sounds until they go, "Yes, that's her- that's what we want!'"
     Hughes has been one of the lucky ones- "knock on wood," she says- who left a soap and remained busy.  After seven years as GH's Anna Devane Lavery Scorpio, Hughes has enjoyed roles in several nighttime series, including Jack's Place, Blossom and Pacific Palisades.  She starred in the USA Network movie The Crying Child, the Fox-TV film Generation X and Jeckyll Island, and she recently completed a diaster film with Dennis Hopper called Tycus.  She's currently appearing on the stage in Noel Coward's Present Laughter at the Pasadena Playhouse in L.A.
     'The Theatre is definately a big challenge and quite scary,' she says in her proper British accent. 'There's nobody to save you except yourself- there's no editor, no director, no person who can splice a performance together.  This play is very difficult because it's a comedy.  I find it fairly challenging to get the character right every night so that the laughs come when they should.  In something like this, you get an immediate response- the audience tells you if you've got it right or not.'
    'The more varied your career, the more you understand about acting,' she continues.  'Everything makes you the actress you are.  Oddly enough, I've found that the low-budget, independent, weird little projects I've done have been the most rewarding because everyone is doing it on a budget and doing it because they want to.  I had an experience last year with a movie called 12 Bucks, which was literally made for about 12 bucks,' she says with a laugh.  'Two young guys put it together for a charity, for a children's home, so we waived our fees.  I did a day's work on the film, and they were two of the most enthusiastic young men I've ever worked with.'
     'Recently, they rang me up out of the blue and said they had a copy of the movie and that they wanted to see me.  I told them I was in a play, and they turned up that night, sitting in the front row, laughing their heads off,' says Hughes, adding that former GH castmates Kin Shriner (Scott, GH/PC) and Lynn Herring (Lucy, GH/PC) also came to see the show.
     Pocahontas II:  Journey to a New World will undoubtedly bring Hughes to yet another new audience.  She already can feel the impact of a Disney role.  'It's the thing that has impressed all my young friends the most,' she says.  'I've gone up in their estimation.'"

Keeping Track- Since leaving daytime, Finola Hughes has made it Big Time
She's now part of Aaron Spelling's stable of thoroughbred stars (SID 1998?)
"When Santa Clause pulls out his list and starts checking it twice, he tends to stop at the name Finola Hughes: she's been both naughty and nice. During her seven-year run as Anna Scorpio on General Hospital, the actress transformed her altar ego from troublemaker to troubleshooter. Now a primetime hot property, she's playing Pacific Palisades' Kate Russo, the most forgiving spouse this side of The Stepford Wives. 'But,' she tells Soaps in Depth, 'it is an Aaron Spelling show, so that's not how it's going to remain. He loves for his characters to have conflict.'
     For the moment, the challenge facing Hughes is how to play her good girl part well. 'If you have a genuine character,' she explains, 'you've got to give her layers. If you just present her as a good guy, people won't buy it.'
     Certainly Hughes imbued her GH counterpart with layers, more than onions have. For her part, she was rewarded with not only a devoted throng of admirers but a 1991 Outstanding Actress Daytime Emmy Award as well. 'I wish I had been at the ceremony to accept it,' she says, 'but I was back in London getting my green card so that I could remain in America.'
     Hughes and her husband, Russell, a music video director and fellow Brit, maintain homes in both England and the States. 'But we stay here,' she notes. 'I've been in the U.S. for about 13 years now.' In that time, Hughes has amassed an impressive body of work. Besides her daytime soap stint, she was a regular on Blossom and on the short-lived Jack's Place. Even before GH, she was well-known for having two-stepped with John Travolta in the Saturday Night Fever sequel, Staying Alive. 'I started dancing when I was 3,' she says. 'But I quit.'
     These days, for recreation, Hughes and her better half take long drives- really long ones. 'Russell's a big traveler,' she reveals. 'Whenever we can, we just hit the road. America's a great place to do that and just see what happens. That's the freedom of this country.'
     One thing that Hughes isn't likely to encounter down the pike is a GH comeback, despite the fact that Anna's corpse never was found. 'The bodies are never found,' she notes. 'That would be pretty gruesome to show on daytime TV.'"

A Ghost of a Chance  Finola Hughes Reveals Her Wish for Anna's Resurrection (by Kelli M. Larson, SID 4/20/99)
Although Finola Hughes has been gone from GH for more than seven years now, her spectre, and that of her character, the late double agent-turned-police chief Anna Devane, still loomed over the Port Charles waterfront- with good reason. The Daytime Emmy Award winnder brought to vivid life one of soaps' most intriguing heroines, a plaything of passion who succeeded at crime, then at crime fighting, all the while juggling a number of dangerous lovers and raising a precious daughter. The actress suggests that her Wonder Woman alter ego struck such a cord with viewers because she emodied the qualities of "daring and vulnerability. I think that women could relate to the fact that she was willing to try anything, but that she also made a lot of mistakes- it made her realistic."
     Could Anna Return to GH?  Since the character supposedly was blown to smithereens in a 1991 boat explosion, Hughes' only GH appearance was five years later, when Anna returned as a vision in order to comfort her grown-up little girl, Robin, after beau Stone succumbed to AIDS. Now, though Robin has left Port Charles, her mother might come back if she was asked. (After all, Anna's body never was found!) "Sure, I'd consider it," she admits. "But I don't know how they would write it. It's up to them, really."
     The Afterlife  Until such time as heaven sends Anna back to Port Charles, her portrayer is keeping busy working in a variety of media. Why, in the last year alone, she took to the stage as the vibrantly funny Liz Essendine in Noel Coward's Present Laughter, at the Pasadena Playhouse, was a betrayed wife on Aaron Spelling's wrongly condemned property, Pacific Palisades, and completed work on two films, Tycus, with Dennis Hopper (due out in July), and Intrepid, with Costas Mandylor and Sonia Satra (ex-Barbara, OLTL). "Tycus is about a comet heading toward Earth; it should be pretty exciting," she relates. "In Intrepid, I was a reporter, like a Downtown Julie Brown."
     Funny Business  Hughes' favorite recent work, however, was opposite Tracey Ullman in a skit on her HBO series, Tracey Takes On. "It was fantastic," exclaims the versatile performer, who once revealed her fancy footwork to John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever sequel Stayin' Alive. "Tracey was the man, and I was the female ballroom dancer."
    "Comedy is much harder, especially with an audience," she adds, "because they tell you right then and there if they think you stink or not."
     Of course, Hughes is not stranger to the kind of high-stakes energy to the kind of high-stakes energy that comes from working a live crowd. In fact, it is her action-packed days of yore on GH that she looks back most fondly upon. "I got to build such camaraderie with the people I worked with," she says. "We had a lot of fun because the storylines were very fast-paced and there were lots of crazy adventures."  And for this intrepid thrill-seeker, the adventures aren't over yet.
     Glory Days-  Finola Hughes recalls the men in her life on GH  Finola Hughes (ex-Anna) has no trouble recalling what made the late-great-'80s so riveting for GH viewers. "Gloria Monty, the executive producer at the time, was very much into reality, and she allowed us to improvise a lot. Plus, with Tristan Rogers (ex-Robert), you really had to improvise a lot, and that was a lot of fun," Hughes relates. But it was her good friend and on-screen paramour, Ian Buchanan (ex-Duke; ex-James, B&B), with whom she shared the most laughs. "Every day was a party with Ian," she remembers. "I knew him so very, very well that I'm sure there was a very thin dividing line between the acting and the real life. That's the beauty of being in a long-running series: You get very comfortable, and I think that's when some of the nicer things happen."