John Stamos recalls yelling at Elizabeth Taylor on “General Hospital”: 'Get that old lady out of my eye line!'
John Stamos' very first screen credit came on General Hospital — and as he honed his craft on the soap opera, he accidentally berated a two-time Oscar winner.
In an interview with SiriusXM's The Jess Cagle Show, the Full House actor reflected on an early moment in his career when he struggled with an emotional scene on General Hospital and lashed out at a surprising visitor on set.
"It was one of those scenes where it was the first time when my mother was dying on the scene in the show," Stamos said. "And I never really experienced that and I was trying to say, 'My mother's dead. My mother's dead,' in my head, and my head was like, 'No she's not. She's teaching CCD down in Orange County.'"
Stamos went on to explain that he had witnessed another actor on the show complain about a disruption to their eye line on set, so he decided to try it himself. "I heard this rustling, and it was, I couldn't get through the scene," he said. "I was f—ing it up. I couldn't get to that emotional place, and I heard rustling and I heard a pop… and then I was like, 'Get that old lady out of my eye line!'"
Tommaso Boddi/Getty Images; Rebecca Sapp/WireImage John Stamos and Elizabeth Taylor
Stamos only realized whom he'd yelled at after the deed was done. "The old lady was Elizabeth Taylor, and she just popped, they popped a bottle of champagne in the director's chair," he said. Taylor was apparently visiting set because she was a friend of Stamos' castmate Anthony Geary, and had appeared in three episodes of the series in 1981.
Stamos' new memoir If You Would Have Told Me has unveiled a number of fascinating episodes from his tumultuous life, including the incident in which the actor found his then-girlfriend in bed with Tony Danza and the moment when he learned about his Full House costar Bob Saget's death. While promoting the book, he has also reflected on his journey to sobriety and said that he has no memory of filming My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2.
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