22 Facts About Carla Gray

Carla Gray is a fictional character from the American soap opera One Life to Live, played by actress Ellen Holly.

Carla Gray was one of the original characters created for the show and was featured in a groundbreaking and very controversial storyline about race relations.

Carla Gray was a lighter-skinned Black American passing as a white woman.

The fact that the character of Carla Gray was actually Black was not revealed to the show's audience until about five months after Ellen Holly debuted in the role.

Carla Gray, who is assumed to be Italian American, begins working as Jim's receptionist.

Carla Gray briefly accepts the proposal but eventually returns Jim's ring, after realizing she would only be marrying him in order to keep perpetuating a lie.

Carla Gray is able to mend fences with her mother, who stresses that she must be proud of her heritage.

Ed is a blue-collar, "salt of the earth" workingman who initially considers Carla Gray to be a stuck-up princess.

Ed blames himself for the death of his good friend Meredith Lord Wolek, who is killed during a hostage crisis by Earl Brock at the Lord family estate, Llanfair at the same time that Carla Gray finds her life on the line.

Carla Gray meets with the man, who points a gun at her and almost shoots her, but Joe Riley comes to her rescue.

The man after Carla Gray is revealed to be Lester Brock, the brother of Earl Brock, who blamed Ed for the murder of his brother.

Carla Gray appears in a supporting capacity in the Jenny Wolek and Tim Siegel romance storyline as a friend of Jenny's and as the steadfast confidante of longtime friend Anna Wolek.

Toward the end of the decade, Carla Gray did get the spotlight in one more love triangle: she divorces Ed to marry Dr Jack Scott, a surgeon who arrived in Llanview in 1978 and operated on Ed to fix his heart condition.

Carla Gray still has feelings for Ed, but she falls in love and nearly marries a football star-turned-nightclub owner Alec Lowndes.

In September 1985, Carla Gray accepts a job in Arizona similar to what she was doing in Llanview.

Carla Gray isn't just a wonderful writer, she is a genius.

The character of Carla Gray was conceptualized in Agnes Nixon's original show Bible, and as such is considered part of the story of Llanview from the beginning.

Holly originally had reservations about working on a soap opera, as the bulk of her acting roles up to that point had been in the New York theater scene, but she took the job anyway, believing that her storyline with Lillian Hayman's Sadie Carla Gray was very important and should be told on television, while not wanting to turn down one year's worth of work and steady pay.

Ed Hall and Carla Gray were initially supposed to marry in the summer of 1973.

Finally, Holly took issue with the prominence of Erika Slezak's character Victoria "Viki" Riley in Carla Gray's 1979 wedding storyline; Holly alleged that Slezak thought her participation as matron-of-honor in Carla Gray's wedding was an attempt to "give luster" to the storyline.

Carla Gray intuited that storyline options for the character of Carla promised to her by Arley, like one that would have involved Carla adopting children and raising them as a single mother, would not be going forward.

Carla Gray could have told me this at the end of the day.