Anne's World
More than just a soap star, ATWT's Anne Sward is also a songbird, a social activist and a loving mother
SOW

When Anne Sward first joined the cast of As The World Turns, she felt terribly miscast in her role as nurse Lyla Montgomery. And not without reason. "I screened for and was contracted to play the part of (Lyla's sister) Maggie," she says. "When I came to New York from Los Angeles, all of a sudden I was playing the part of Lyla. (Mary Linda Rapeleye became Maggie.) I had all these children, and I don't know if they knew what to do with me."

ATWT did eventually come up with many interesting stories for Lyla, but it took roughly six years before they incorporated Sward's singing talent into the role. When Lyla's son, Craig (Scott Bryce), was opening the Mona Lisa with Lisa (Eileen Fulton), Sward says, "I saw a window open, an opportunity to sing." She proposed the idea to head writer Doug Marland, and he made Lyla the club's star attraction.

But while the spotlight may be on Lyla, the camera isn't necessarily on Sward, because storylines often require characters to be talking over her singing. "That aspect is frustrating," she admits. "A lot of people wouldn't put up with that. But I like to sing, so I just do it."

Sward has been writing her own material. So far she has sung three of her own songs, one being Lyla and Cal's theme, Till I Found You, which she debuted last September.

Writing her own material has renewed Sward's interest in recording an album. "I got such a big request from the fans to record From Now On (Lyla and Casey's theme song)," she remembers. There was even talk at one point of a major record label releasing it, but the deal never materialized. "I never pushed it," she says. "Now I have a product that I want to push."

She is well aware of how much pushing it takes to snag a record deal. "The market is very suppressed," she says. "You used to be able to come in with some kind of development. Now you practically have to come in with the whole thing produced yourself."

Aside from a few years of piano lessons, Sward has never had any formal training in music. She began singing in church and learned guitar from high school friend Steven Tellericho, who's better known now as Steven Tyler, the lead vocalist of the rock group Aerosmith. "He taught me the chords to help me get going," she says.

While at Emerson College in Boston in the early '70s, Sward's interest turned to folk music. "I did all those Charles Street coffeehouses," she laughs. She was also attracted to musical theater, especially "anything with a contralto base.

"I got into a blues thing when I was doing my graduate work at the University of Miami," she remembers. "I majored in theater arts, but I hung around a lot of the jazz (students). They have a tremendous jazz school down there. I should have changed my major."

While in Miami, Sward found work singing backup at a recording studio. "I met up with people like Greg Allman," she says. "I was going to go on the road with him, but he was in his coke phase and I didn't want to die young." Since acting jobs were starting to come in, Sward decided to concentrate on that, because "it's very, very difficult to go after both industries at the same time."

But Sward changed her tune a few years ago and parlayed Lyla's singing career into her own nightclub act. "It was a very easy thing to flow into," she admits. One of the biggest advantages of the nightclub, she jokes, was that "I was finally allowed to finish one of my songs."

Since the birth of her daughter, Cori Anne Hansen (who plays her on-screen daughter, Katie), 3 years ago, Sward hasn't had much time for nightclubs. In addition to ATWT and the demands of being a wife and mother, she also puts in time as a board member and vice president of the American Indian College Fund, an organization she helped found.

Her interest in the problems of American Indians began several years ago when she was donating sweaters and blankets to a clothing drive for reservations. The people organizing the drive discovered who she was and asked her to become a spokesperson. "I said I didn't know the issues well enough, but the said, 'Go out there (to the Dakotas) and learn them.' I started traveling to the reservations, and I found there's a lot of problems out there," she states. "But bringing in clothing is not an answer. It's a great big bandage. I became discouraged because it also affects the dignity of the people."

The answer, she felt, lay in education that taught Western ways while preserving each tribe's culture. An Indian group had already established the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, which lobbies Washington for funding for scholarships and administering community colleges. A volunteer at first, Sward was pegged to set up a fund-raising group for the private sector. "I went to a board meeting with a proposal for a fund-raiser and walked out chairman of the American Indian College Fund."

She's also active in efforts to preserve Indian burial grounds and other sacred sties. "Because (the Indians) don't have marked tombstones, the government doesn't recognize (certain areas) as official burial grounds," she explains. "So people will open graves, study bones and charge admission to see them."

Sward would love to see ATWT deal with the issue, so much so that she even wrote the treatment for a land rights story and submitted it to Marland. Although she doesn't want to give away too much of the plot, Sward will reveal that it involves Cal and an oil field that sits on a sacred Indian site. She's glad ATWT will pursue this subject, but even if it weren't, she would have reworked it into a movie-of-the-week script. "I want the average American to learn about these issues," she says. "And television is a great medium for that."

This is not the first storyline Sward has helped initiate. She and Hillary Bailey Smith (ex-Margo) were the ones who originally brought the idea of Lyla's husband Casey's (Bill Shanks) right to die to Marland. "Billy wanted off the show and we needed a way to get him off," she explains. But Smith left before they could play out the story. However, when Ellen Dolan replaced Smith, Shanks made a short-term return and the storyline was resumed -- although differently than Sward expected. In their original version, she and Smith had planned for Lyla, not Margo, to pull the plug. "I think that would have been more sympathetic," Sward states. But she does admit "they got more use to the characters by doing it this way. It was the most difficult thing I've ever played because it was so real," Sward admits.

Given the emotionality of that storyline and Lyla's loss, she's glad the show waited before giving her a new love interest. And all joking aside about Cal's millions, she truly believes that in some ways he's a better match for Lyla than Casey was. "As much as people thought Lyla and Casey were adorable, they were really a mixed match," she insists. "There was always this degree of paranoia about their ages."

Also, Shanks was not always easy to work with. "Billy was so adorable and cute, but he had no discipline. He was a prankster. He'd do stuff that would get me rip-roarin' mad, like pulling the zipper down on my gown so when the camera came on me my dress would almost fall off." But as usual, Sward took charge of the situation. "He did all these adolescent things, until one day he pulled stunt offcamera and I made a fist and planted it as hard as I could in her solar plexus. He never touched me again," she laughs.

--Gerald J. Waggett

Links to Photos: Anne & Cori Anne, Lyla & Cal, Anne & Cori Anne, Anne & Cori Anne, Anne & Others

Photo Captions: Like mother, like daughter: Sward's 3-year-old, Cori Anne, is also an ATWT actress. She plays Lyla's daughter Katie.

Although an accomplished singer, Sward hasn't done many nightclub gigs lately. She's far too busy with Cori Anne and her work as a board member and vice president of the American Indian College Fund, an organization she helped found.