This year I am dreaming of Jeanne. Jeanne Cooper that is. The dynamic star of “Y&R” won the Emmy for Best Actress in a Daytime Drama last year and it was a long time overdue. But Academy voters are pondering their choices again this year and it’s a year full of sensational performances. Along with Cooper, other Best Actress nominations should include Melody Thomas Scott, Jess Walton, Katherine Kelly Lang and Kim Zimmer. Sorry ABC and NBC, but CBS was on top of its game this year. Though Susan Flannery is my all time favorite actress, I think “B&B” really allowed Kelly Lang to shine. She should have been nominated last year for the rape storyline of Brooke. That storyline was the best written and plotted out story in daytime drama in 2007.

But this year I think Jeanne Cooper will win again. This week when Katherine arrived back at her mansion to find her key, break in and try to figure out the rest of her life, after being struck by amnesia after a car crash that killed her friend and doppelganger Marge. Leaving her family to think that Kay had actually died, since no one realized Marge was back in town. Jess Walton, Kate Linder and Melody Thomas Scott poured their hearts into the storyline and divvied up the spoils of Kay’s fortune. Over a billion dollars to be exact. Nikki got the jewelry, Esther got half of the mansion and enough millions to keep her and her trampy daughter Chloe comfortable for the rest of their lives. But Jill inherited the bulk of Kay’s empire.

So happy Jill was to look over at the Christmas tree and see her dead mother. Then bang! Jill started having doubts and instead of listening to her confused 80-year-old mom, she, in fact, accused her of being Marge, a fraud, and had her mom thrown in the clink. But who could have guessed? Kay Chancellor’s bunkmate in jail was none other than Gloria Baldwin Fisher Abbott Bardwell, who is in jail for putting poison in a face cream three years ago, in which a woman died and many others were injured by the cleaning fluid she poured in the containers. Jeanne Cooper played the confused, aged yet tough Katherine to perfection. Confused one moment, angry at her daughter Jill the next.

Jess Walton deserves credit for being almost equally as brilliant. As Constance Towers recently described Walton’s work, “She’s very dependable as an actress.” She certainly is dependable, but Cooper has reinvented Katherine so many times that you wonder what storage she has inside her well of talent that continues to make her one of daytime’s best. For years there was always buzz around Hall, Lucci and Slezak. Great actresses yes, stars, most certainly. But the one actress everyone in daytime dreams of working with is Cooper. Susan Flannery’s the one everyone is intimidated to work with. Not because she’s tough. She’s a softy, full of warm energy and strong genuine character. But she’s a force of nature as an actress. So if I can’t choose Flannery for Best Lead Actress in a Drama, I think she’ll agree with me that Jeanne Cooper and Katherine Kelly Lang should definitely be nominated. Cooper, however, pulled it off again in 2008 and she really is the Gold Standard of Actresses in daytime this week and beyond.

Honorable mentions for the week include Kyle Lowder, who has turned Rick Forrester into his mother’s son. Wait until Stephanie (Susan Flannery) finds out that Rick has gone to yet another female member of her family. This time granddaughter Steffy. I cannot wait until Stephanie finds out. Wouldn’t it be delicious if a longtime family friend and Canyon News Editor went to Her Majesty Queen Stephanie to tell her that he overheard a conversation at Café Rouse that her granddaughter Steffy was seeing Brooke Logan’s son Rick? Well, we’ll leave the writing to the master writer of daytime, Mr. Bradley P. Bell. This man, like his late father William J. Bell, doesn’t need any help in that category. Bell’s writing is a gold standard every day.

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