On May 21, 1999, Shemar Moore, a star from the soap opera The Young and the Restless, stood on stage to present the Daytime Emmy Award for Best Actress. Right before announcing the winner, he famously shouted, “The streak is over, Susan Lucci!” With those words, he presented the award to the star of ABC’s All My Children. It was Lucci’s very first Emmy win after being nominated in the Best Actress category for 19 years.
Susan Lucci was born in Garden City, New York. After graduating from college in 1968, she moved to New York City to start an acting career. In 1969, she played a small role in the films Goodbye, Columbus and Me, Natalie. Her big break came shortly after when she got the role of a troubled teenager named Erica Kane on a brand-new soap opera called All My Children.
The show made its television debut on January 5, 1970, and for the next forty years, Lucci was Erica Kane. Over those four decades, the character lived an incredibly dramatic life. Erica Kane married no fewer than 11 times to eight different men, though several of those marriages turned out to be legally invalid. She also had several children and grandchildren, was kidnapped, and managed to survive both an airplane crash and a car accident.
By 1991, TV Guide described her as “unequivocally the most famous soap-opera character in the history of TV.” And The New York Times once reported that Lucci was the highest-paid actor on daytime television at the time, earning more than $1 million per year for her work.
Lucci won a Best Soap Actress award in a 1985 People magazine poll and received a Soap Opera Digest Editors Award in 1989 for her outstanding contribution to daytime television.
Lucci received her first Daytime Emmy nomination in 1978. Soon, she began getting nominations year after year, but without winning. Until May 21, 1999, Lucci was finally called to receive her award. Her emotional speech brought tears to the eyes of many celebrities in the crowd, including talk show host Rosie O’Donnell and Lucci’s All My Children co-stars Kelly Ripa and Marcy Walker.
Lucci expressed her gratitude to her husband, Helmut Huber, as well as the cast, crew, and her fans. She ended her speech by saying, “I’m going to go back to that studio Monday and I’m going to play Erica Kane for all she’s worth.”
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