On Suzanne Rogers’ 50th Days of Our Lives Anniversary, a Tribute to the Heroine Who Learned Not Just to Walk But Run — Plus, Rare Photos of Maggie’s Life
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When it comes to the history of daytime, few characters have such impressive parents as Days of Our Lives’ Maggie Simmons Horton Kiriakis. We don’t mean her actual parents, of course. Poor Elmer and Dorothy Simmons were already dead in the car accident that left Maggie unable to walk when we first met her 50 years ago on August 20, 1973.
So rather, we mean her creative parents. Maggie was the brain child of legendary daytime luminaries William J. Bell and Betty Corday. Bell was already working on his own soap by then as he got The Young and the Restless off the ground, but Days of Our Lives hadn’t let him go just yet. And Corday, of course, created NBC’s hit soap with her husband, Ted, just eight years earlier.
If there’s one thing Days of Our Lives has always excelled at, it’s creating supercouples — and that’s exactly what Bell and Corday were intending when they brought a young Suzanne Rogers in practically straight from Radio City Music Hall! It was the young Rockette’s first role as an exciting new love interest for Mickey Horton, who at the time had amnesia and was going by “Marty!”
Those first few years were tricky, Rogers told TV Guide Magazine back in 2013, because even though Maggie couldn’t walk, the show didn’t want her in a wheelchair, “so I spent my first two and a half years of the show on crutches.” She recalled those early days with some amusement, saying, “They had me running a household, cooking meals, setting the table, cleaning house — all on crutches. Physically, it was very tricky. Thank God they hired a dancer!”
And then there was the romance. Mickey, the viewers all knew, was still married to Laura Horton. So while Maggie and “Marty” were pretty much an instant hit, it took some time before they could truly start running. It all worked out, though, as these things do on soap operas, when Maggie regained the use of her legs after a miracle surgery and Mickey regained his memory and divorced Laura.
He married Maggie shortly after (for real, this time!) and Maggie and Rogers were off at the races! In the decades since she first appeared, Maggie’s tackled pretty much everything a good soap opera heroine would over the years, from alcoholism and affairs, to long-lost children and “Who’s the daddy?” plots. She’s had ups and downs, run her own businesses, lost the use of her legs (again!) and was killed off for a time when the Salem Slasher seemed to cull half the town of Salem.
She’s survived story droughts and real-life losses like when Frances Reid passed away in 2010. After the show said goodbye to Alice, Maggie seamlessly took over as the beloved head of the Horton family. And while her marriages have had their ups and downs, there’s only really been two loves in Maggie’s life: Mickey and Victor.
The first, she said goodbye to in 2010 when the show, after having recast Mickey three times after John Clarke’s retirement in 2004 and keeping Mickey off-screen for two years, decided to kill off the character. And now, just as Days of Our Lives is honoring Rogers for playing the longest running role on the show, Maggie has to say farewell to Victor.
We don’t think anyone imagined that we’d be celebrating Rogers’ incredible milestone and mourning John Aniston and Victor Kiriakis’ passing at the same time, but we suppose it’s sadly fitting to put in yet another powerhouse performance and show us exactly why she’s called Salem home these past 50 years. Rogers’ performances throughout this sadly necessary story have been heart wrenching and powerful. And we have no doubt she’ll continue to bring us to tears through it all.
