Lesley-Anne Down is bold, beautiful… and completely uninterested in returning to The Bold and the Beautiful.
The actress played Jackie Marone on B&B from 2003, when producers added her to the daytime drama’s cast, to 2012, when they declined to renew her contract.
And Down recently told Entertainment Weekly she wouldn’t accept an offer to return to the show — though she didn’t specify why.
“I’d say to them, ‘Well, you’re going to have to call up Linda Gray,’” she said, referring to the fellow Dallas alum who had a guest role on B&Bbetween 2004 and 2005. “Why would you even think I would go back and do that?”
Down does, however, have fond memories of her B&B time — and not just because she “got to kiss two of the world’s really most charming, loveliest men, Sean Kanan and Brandon Beamer, who were gorgeous and both of them 30, 40 years younger than me,” as she joked.
Down shared with EW that she didn’t need the money when she was offered the part of Jackie Marone and wanted to focus on motherhood. “But then I thought, ‘Well, you know, it’s a half-hour show.’ And it was only like two days a week,” she said. “And so I went, ‘OK, fine.’ So that’s why I did that. I didn’t expect it to go on for nine years.”
The Sunset Beach alum enjoyed herself on B&B, calling it “the most stress-free gig on the planet,” in which she did “easy and pleasant” work with “lovely” people.
“It was great because it gave me so much freedom,” she added. “I had no reason to go on location. I had my little boy, no reason to go on location. I could be a full-time mother.”
Down’s B&B gig won over viewers, too. Jackie made Soaps.com’s list of the 35 best B&B characters ever, the site saying that despite the character’s “checkered past” and her “fondness for boy toys,” she seemed like the heiress apparent to Stephanie Forrester’s (Susan Flannery) throne. And Daytime Confidential ranked Jackie’s romance with Owen Knight (Beemer) one of the 10 best soap couples of 2009, saying the onscreen pairing “felt organic and highly erotic.”
The Bold and the Beautiful, Weekdays, CBS