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- Welcome, to more behind the scenes of The Waltons.
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Today, I'm going to be talking about the episode,
The Abdication.
I personally found this episode really fascinating
because, I didn't know that much
specifically about the history of Edward the 8th,
and what happened when he gave up the throne.
Although my mother was born in England,
I don't remember her specifically talking about
that particular point in time.
But, I think like a lot of Americans
and maybe people in other countries
during that time period,
there was a real fascination about the Royal Family
and about what was happening, and about this,
you know, unprecedented relationship
between Edward and Wallis Simpson, a divorcee,
and the scandal of it,
and of course, that was reflected
in this episode of The Waltons.
Quite frequently, The Waltons dealt with
actual historical events of the time.
And when something like that came up in an episode,
I quite often did a little extra research about it
just to learn more.
And because it was usually fascinating things,
and things that I may have studied in school.
But, having that personal connection to it,
to be playing characters that were actually addressing
those incidents in history,
gave me a whole other layer
of connection to those events.
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So of course, my character of Mary Ellen
thought that this whole romance between
Edward and Wallis Simpson
was romantic and potentially tragic
in this decision he had to make.
And I think, that was a point of view
that I could relate to at that point
in my life in portraying those events.
This episode also touched on aspects of John-Boy's
future writing career and his decision at that point,
not to become a writer for the movies.
Which of course, Earl Hamner in real life,
ultimately did go on to do.
And Earl touched on that in the final narration
of the episode where he talked about going to Hollywood
and getting into writing for film and television.
So a little bit of him foreshadowing
during this episode of The Waltons.
People often ask whether episodes were based
on real instance in Earl's life.
And some of them were,
and some of them were loosely based
on things that happened,
and some of them, I believe were absolutely fictitious.
(laughing)
Just like the characters were.
They were not particularly the direction
that Earl's actual brothers and sisters
chose in their lives.
Their professions or,
you know, who they married
and what their husband or wife might have,
you know, done as a profession, things like that.
How many children they had.
So it was a mix of fact and fiction
as was this particular episode.
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I had a lot of fun with Mary Ellen's storyline
in this episode.
And particularly the scenes that Mary and I shared,
where we were talking about
the handsome, young Englishman
who came to the mountain,
who asks Mary Ellen to
walk down to Ike Godsey's store for a soda.
You know, it's kind of a date and how excited Mary Ellen is.
And she gets all dressed up and does her hair
in a pretty short period of time.
(laughing)
But then Mary Ellen,
you know, never dallied around about things like that.
You know, she was going to do something, she just did it.
But, in real life, actor Stephen Collins,
who played the Englishman who,
you know, put on a lovely English accent, I thought.
And he was very handsome,
Mary and I both thought he was very handsome,
and we enjoyed having him on set.
I remember one particular time,
I think it was his last day,
and we were like,
oh, we don't want him to be done,
we want him to come back
and, you know, shoot additional days.
So Mary and I were were kidding around,
plotting how we were going to keep messing up our lines,
so they had to keep doing takes so they'd run out of time,
and we wouldn't finish his scene,
so he'd have to come back the next day.
Of course, we didn't actually follow through with that.
But we had fun plotting how we might bring that about.
So even in the midst of,
you know, being serious about the work,
we had a lot of fun
and that was an example of that,
and the fun of that episode.
It's always fun when you shoot a film within a film.
You know, to see the way The Waltons interacted
with a movie set as if they knew nothing about it,
and for us being on a movie set,
then dealing with it in a way and pretending
that all of this was alien to us was,
it was always kind of fascinating to do.
So that's just a little bit of behind the scenes
of the episode, The Abdication.
Hope you enjoyed this,
and I'll be back with more behind the scenes
of The Waltons.
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