Ray Wise, who recently returned to The Young and the Restless as baddie Ian Ward, had plenty of show biz experience before stepping foot in Genoa City. With a career spanning 55 years and over 250 credits to his name, Wise reflects, “My goal always was to be a working, professional actor and that was it. That’s what I wanted to achieve and I was able to do that.
“I had a steady flow to my career,” he adds. “I had some high points and never really too many low points, so I’ve been pretty consistent. I always wanted to keep working, going on to the next thing. I wasn’t the kind of actor to say no if I could possibly say yes, Nos didn’t come easy to me.”
Here, the actor looks back at some of the projects on his impressive resumé. “They’ve all been interesting and special to me,” he says.
“I started out in Hollywood on Charlie’s Angels and I played an ex-Army veteran who was stalking a professional lady golfer played by Jamie Lee Curtis. It was, like, her second job as she had just done Halloween. So she’s guest-starring on this episode of Charlie’s Angels and I guest-starred with her and she’s gone on to do all right for herself. [Laughs].”
“I played a character by the name of Hal Rumley. I don’t remember a whole lot about that, but I know that I really enjoyed talking with [the late] Bill Hayes [Doug Williams]. He was just a wonderful man and a good, good actor. I really enjoyed my time talking with him and his wife, Susan Seaforth Hayes [Julie Williams]. He and I go all the way back to 1967 when he did a production of, I believe, Do I Hear a Waltz? at a summer stock outfit called Kenley Players in Ohio. I was an apprentice, and I moved around the scenery and I played in small parts and he was very sweet to me then. I’ll always remember him.”
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“I love RJ, Robert Wagner. He and I still keep our friendship going and we get in touch with each other once or twice a year. We always wanted to do a movie where we played brothers, but it just never happened. That would have been great because we look like we’re from the same family. So when I did the episode of that show, Hart To Hart, we had the biggest drag-out fight that Jonathan [played by Wagner] ever had on the show. He and I destroyed their living room in their house. And it was a great experience.”
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“Another show that I really enjoyed doing was The Colbys, with Charleston Heston [Jason Colby] and Ricardo Montalban [Zachary Powers]. I was Ricardo Montalban’s stepson, Spiro Koralis, and I was dating and sleeping with Charlton Heston’s daughter [Monica Colby, played by Tracy Scoggins]. We did one episode where I was in bed with the daughter and there’s a knock on the door and I quickly have put my pajama bottoms on. I went to the door and opened it up and there was Chuck Heston, looking for his daughter. I remember how memorable that little scene was at the time.”
“I didn’t even have a name in that. They just called me the cocaine dealer. I remember that they would put me in Julie Harris’ [Lilimae Clemens] dressing room on days that she wasn’t there. and I enjoyed doing that show.”
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“Leland Palmer was a standout character in my career and always will be. That show had such a great impact on television in its entirety. It opened up the doors for so many other shows within that genre. It’s amazing that Twin Peaks ever got on a major network on the air in the first place, and that was only because ABC gave David Lynch and Mark Frost carte blanche or else they weren’t going to do it. So there were things that Twin Peaks accomplished that no television show had ever accomplished before. It was really instrumental in blowing open the doors of television there for a while. I remember I was making a movie in Romania one time and I left the hotel to go to the wine store across the street. A car stopped right in the middle of the street and they wanted to give me a ride to the wine store and I said, ‘No, thank you. I don’t need a ride.’ And they called me Leland Palmer. Twin Peaks was a big show in Romania and in about 70 or 75 different foreign countries, so this face of mine was known all over the place, I guess. I remember I made a movie in Madrid, Spain and the same thing happened. They would know my face and characters that I played and not necessarily know my name.”
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“I loved playing Mike Todd, and [Twin Peaks costar] Sherilyn Fenn made a beautiful Elizabeth Taylor. We had some very interesting locations, including the Queen Mary, that I enjoyed. It was a real thrilling pleasure to play that character and to be with Sherilyn. My hope was always that Elizabeth Taylor watched it. I don’t know if she did or not, but I always hoped that she did.”
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“I enjoyed my last series on ABC where I played Marvin the Dentist. He was one of the 100 best dentists in Orlando, Florida. I loved being on that show with that beautiful family and Randall Park [Louis Huang] is one of my favorite human beings on the planet.”