The years that she did spend there were good ones. "My main memory is of all the women I knew on the show, like Charita [Bauer, ex-Bert], and Fran Myers [ex-Peggy] used to be a great friend of mine." Adams's main storyline — the tortured triangle of Mike/Leslie/Ed — was also a bright spot. "I really enjoyed doing it, until the character got married [to Mike] and she was happy." That, in turn, was the impetus for Adams to leave. "The character got boring, frankly," she shares. "It was very conservative and boring and happy. Not that happy is bad; happy is great, but it's not that great on a soap opera. You want to have some conflict and drama, and her biggest drama was that she was worried that her stepdaughter was going to get involved with some guy. It just wasn't interesting, so I left."

GL has ties to Adams's current project, Made-Up, a comedy about our culture of beauty that she wrote, starred in (with her sister, Brooke Adams, as well as brother-in-law Tony Shalhoub and Eva Amurri) and produced with Sister Films, a company she founded with Brooke. "The whole time I was on GUIDING LIGHT, I used to dye my hair because I went white when I was about 16," she shares. "After I had been off the soap for a while, I let my hair go, and it was shocking the difference in the way people treated me. You feel like you've disappeared and you're not a viable person somehow. Then, I would go to an audition wearing a wig, and suddenly it was a whole different story again."

That experience led her to write a one-woman show, Two-Faced, which she performed for nine years. Adams then embarked upon the arduous task of taking a version of the play to the screen — "One time, we had the $5 million in the bank and Kevin Kline couldn't do it and all the money fell apart." But, thanks to her husband, George Fifield, a media arts curator, she eventually got it shot on video as a mockumentary. "It's a movie that people who used to know me would love to see," she notes. To check if the film is coming to your area, log onto www.madeupthemovie.com. Adams also points out, "If you click 'Contact,' that [e-mail] comes to me, and I'll answer it."

Sure, her plate is full now, but would Adams ever return to soaps? "If you had asked me two years ago, I would have said yes. If you had asked me 10 years ago, I would have said no. Right now, I live in Boston, so that would make it kind of impossible," she chuckles. "But I loved doing soaps. It was a hard job, but it was really fun. I used to have some relationships with some of the people who watched the show who would write to me. I miss all that."