"Ladies and gentlemen and children of all ages!" With this phrase, Guiding Light's Rick Hearst (Alan-Michael Spaulding) became an actor. "It was the school play in the first grade," he remembers. "I was the ringmaster in a presentation about the circus. I was just going to be a clown and hang out in the background and climb out of a car with all the other midgets, but I stepped in two days before we were supposed to open, because the kid who was going to be ringmaster got incredible stage fright and couldn't remember his lines."

Twists of fate such as this seem to be a theme in Hearst's acting life. "I got what was called a Morton Brown (acting) scholarship to the University of Texas in Austin," he reveals. "Otherwise I wouldn't have been accepted. I applied to the university, and they turned me down. Then I auditioned for the scholarship and when I got it they sent me an acceptance letter. I thought they only did that for people who play ball. To this day, I still have my acceptance letter and my rejection letter."

After two years of training in the university's drama department, Hearst packed his bags and headed back to his home state, New York. "I wanted to get into a more intensive program," he explains. "I saw a notice on the call board in Texas that Circle in the Square (a Manhattan theater) was coming down for a day to audition people, so I worked up two monologues. A week [after my audition] I got a fat letter of acceptance. I started jumping up and down and almost hit my head on the ceiling fan. Then I made a beeline for New York.

"I was fortunate, because my first year at Circle my parents were still supporting me. And my girlfriend, Donna, who is now my wife, was working so she made sure we had food on the table and a roof over out head," he adds. "After I graduated, I got out there and slung hash like everyone else for a year. Then we moved to California."

Hearst found some acting work in the wonderful world of low-budget films. "One was called Brain Damage," he says, chuckling. "It was a horror film, and a real horror experience. I didn't get killed, but the top of my head exploded and electricity flew out of it. I was stoned throughout the thing -- in the movie, not for real. You see my glazed eyes, and I say 'Wow!' and that's the end of the movie. It was actually in theaters for a whole week. My friends and I went to see it in Los Angeles. The other film was called Crossing the Line, and it went straight to video."

A call from Days of Our Lives saved Hearst from becoming the next B-movie king. "My agent told me, 'There's this contract role on Days for three years. The character's name is Scotty Banning. He's a music producer, and he's sexy and charming,'" recalls Hearst. "And I thought, 'Hey, I can play sexy and charming.' When I looked at the character description, I was floored. I kept saying, 'I can do this. This is my character. I'm going to get this.'

"I can't tell you what it was like when I finally got the call," he continues. "It was 12:30 p.m. on Friday, May 29 (1989), and I was watching Days. I called my agent to see if he had heard anything yet, and he said, 'No, they have 10 days [to get back to you], take it easy. So I hung up. Forty-five minutes later he calls me back and says, 'Hi, Rick, how're you doing?' and starts making small talk. And I interrupted him and said, 'I know you know something, and you damn well better tell me.' When he said I'd gotten it, I screamed. To get your first big job like that -- there's nothing like it."

But Hearst admits his experience on Days wasn't an entirely happy one. "We didn't see eye-to-eye on the way the character should be," he explains. "They have a formula way of handling character, and it's tough to break that mold. It wasn't a way in which I was doing my best work. But Days gave me my first job, so I can do nothing but thank them. They gave me a taste of what it was like."

Three weeks short of his first anniversary with the show, Hearst was released from his contract. "I was on the set with Mindy (Clark, who played Scott's girlfriend Faith Taylor). After we were done with our scenes, I still had three more to do. But the stage manager told us Al Rabin (Days' supervising executive producer) wanted to see us in his office," Hearst relates. "It was very quiet, unusually quiet. Just as Mindy and I were sitting down, I looked him dead in the eye and knew exactly what he was going to tell me. It was the most terrifying feeling just to know, all of a sudden, you're going to get axed. He did a lot of explaining why, but I was angry. I felt we didn't get a fair shake. After he told us how much longer we had left, I stood up and said I had to got finish my scenes. He had absolutely no idea I still had scenes to do. When I went downstairs I was numb, but I couldn't let it affect me, it wouldn't have been fair to the other actors. A month later I was gone."

Since his termination came just weeks before he was supposed to get married, Hearst wasted no time finding another job. "I was auditioning like crazy," he admits. "I screen tested for Linc Lafferty on As the World Turns, which Jim Wlcek got. I remember meeting Jim in the audition and saying to myself, 'He's going to get it. He is Linc.' Then this part came up on GL. I went and auditioned two times, and they flew me to New York for a screen test. Two days later I got the call. It was a Tuesday, exactly a week and four days prior to my wedding. I just said, 'Oh, thank God!' and immediately called my wife, who was in Dallas getting ready for the wedding. She let out the biggest yowl I've ever heard -- really crazed. She was [probably thinking] 'Thank God! We're not going to be broke.'"

While GL frantically tried to reach their newest cast member, Hearst took off on his honeymoon. "I told everybody, 'I'm going on my honeymoon. I'll be in Paris. But I'm going to be incommunicado. Don't try to reach me.,'" he states. "When I got back home [to California] I had all these messages. Four days later I was on a plane to New York by myself -- heck of a way to start a marriage. For the first three months we were married we were apart more than we were together. When she was finally here we were very tentative, but we [eventually] settled in -- obviously, since three months later we were making a baby."

Hearst became a father for the first time when Nicholas Charles made his debut this past June 26. "It's the most amazing, spiritual, uplifting, frustrating thing I've ever experienced," he says of his latest role. "It's nothing like I expected. It's harder and easier... Some days, when he gets gas, it's crazy for me. We try to do everything for him -- hold him, bounce him up and down, burp him, bicycle his legs -- but he still cries that non-stop piercing 'I'm in pain and I don't know how to express it cry,' and I feel like just putting him down and banging my head against the wall.

"But then there are other days when it just seems the most natural thing," Hearst muses. "He cries, I talk to him and he calms, and it just seems like I always knew how to do this. It's amazing.

"I love to watch him play around with different expressions, discover what his hands are for, how quickly he can smack himself in the head," Hearst laughs. "I want to make sure I don't ignore any moments in his life, because before I know it, they will be gone and we won't be able to get them back. I didn't want that to happen with Nicky the way it happened with me and my father. We had a lot of time slip past us. I want to make sure my kid's got my full, undivided attention and every bit of love and support, so that whatever he wants to do, he can do."

Fast on the heels of Nicky's birth (actually less than 24 hours later) came another monumental event -- a Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Younger Actor. Hearst admits this one-two punch threw him for a loop. "I was really ready to explode," he admits. "If I had let it all go [at the Emmy ceremony], I would have been a sobbing mess up there. It was a very triumphant feeling when I won, but I was numb, completely numb. So many things had happened, so many changes that had really set me on my ear. When that much stuff is coming at you, be it good or bad, you don't know how to deal with it.

"Success, a lot of times, is just as hard to take [as failure], it really is. After I got off the stage I realized I had forgotten to thank God," he continues. "I've definitely had a charmed life. All I could say when people congratulated me on both counts was, 'Thank you. I can't ask for anything more. I think I'm going to die tomorrow.' Somebody asked me how I felt, and I said, 'Hey, I've got nothing to complain about and everything to be thankful for."

Immediately after the Emmy ceremony, Hearst hurried back to the hospital and his wife, brandishing his award. "I'm walking through the emergency room with this Emmy in my hand, and the security people were just looking at me like, 'Oh, my God, he has a weapon," Hearst laughs. "I went up to maternity, and there was Nicky sitting in her arms. They were both pretty much out, and I said 'Nicky this is for you and Momma.' It was overwhelming."

These days, however, Hearst is not quite so overwhelmed. "Instead of running away from things I've been afraid of in my life -- like commitment to a family, a spouse, what you're doing at work -- I've been trying to tackle them lately,' he states. As for what he'll be tackling in the future, he can only theorize. "I'll probably stay with GL for the extent of my contract and however long they want me after that. Of course, I'd like to branch out and get into films, but I really just want to work. I have very simple needs. I just want to raise my son, be good to my family, get my black belt [in karate] and take everything that comes at me and try to do what I can with it, whatever that may be."

* First appeared in the September 10, 1991 issue of Soap Opera Weekly