The character Stephanie Forrester was said had been synonymous with the daytime soap opera, 'The Bold And The Beautiful'. Emmy-Award winning Irish actress Susan Flannery recognized, "When you're in their homes 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year, they start to think of you as either part of the family or the Walter Cronkite of daytime television." Susan believed, "It's not always talent with getting a role. Often it's personality or something that comes across on a screen that people enjoy watching."
Of her character, Susan had said, "I do think Stephanie is a wholly American character...She's a very typical American woman...A lot of American women are very strong and kind of controlling in a way, which Stephanie is. A lot of them are working, running a family business, taking care of the farm, things like that, and there's a strong 'get on with it' mentality."
Stephen Shortridge made the observation in 1987, "Susan takes pretty dramatic lines and underplays them. It's very effective...Writers overdo the dramatics. And if you play it too close to the script you can mess up...(Bill) Bell works off character emotions, their reactions. Out of that you get a story. He's concerned with what happens to the people. You may have talking heads, but one is affecting another. That's soap. Action doesn't work in this medium. At least, I don't think it does. Usually it looks so stagy and false."
On screen, Stephanie had been known to slap other characters, "...I always tell new cast members, 'Stay at arm's length; that's my best advice.'...They call the writer and ask, 'Is Stephanie going to slap me?'" Off screen, Susan confessed in 2008, "George Bush; I'd like to slap him silly, and Dick Cheney as well. They're 2 nincompoops. Thank God we won't have them any more after this election (in 2008). I just hope they won't do anything terrible to the world before they go. Actually I am a Republican and have been one my whole life until Bush and Cheney. It's sad."
Susan made known, "I always wanted to act since I was a little kid. In high school I joined the drama club at Cathedral High School, the Catholic high school, in Manhattan in New York City. They sent me down on scholarship to Catholic University for a summer program in theater. Then I went to college and majored in theater arts. I was supposed to go to Yale Drama School on full scholarship, but I decided I didn't want to go. I wanted to come to California. So I came out here instead of going to graduate school.
"My whole performance is geared to the audience. I always say to myself – how is the audience going to react to this? How is the audience going to understand this? What is supposed to convey? A lot of people forget but the audience is who you're telling the story for. You have to think that they're there just like a stage audience is."
