Lisa Grimaldi is a fictional character from the CBS soap opera, As the World Turns. The character was portrayed by Eileen Fulton for 50 years from May 1960, until the last episode aired in September 2010, with Fulton becoming one of the longest-serving soap opera actors in the United States. Lisa is considered to be the first soap "vixen" and was one half of the first ever super couple, Bob and Lisa Hughes. Casting As the World Turns creator and longtime head writer Irna Phillips created Lisa in the late 1950s as a short-term character. In a 2007 interview with the Archive of American Television, Fulton explained that ATWT'''s casting director contacted her agent, wanting to audition another of his clients, Lois Smith, for the role, but because Smith was unavailable, he recommended they audition Fulton instead. Lisa was kept on the As the World Turns canvas due to Fulton's day-to-day acting improvement. A Procter & Gamble executive said to Fulton six months into her run as Lisa, "I want to tell you what a wonderful job you are doing, because when you first came on the show we thought, 'We can't keep her. She's not very good.'" Fulton's eagerness to play Lisa as a villainess contributed to the character's popularity and therefore its longevity. In the Archive of American Television interview, Fulton explained that the character was originally written to be a "nice girl", which she did not find compelling as an actress, and that, while she read Phillips' lines exactly as they appeared on the script, she said them with a "scheming tone" in her voice. When Phillips saw Fulton's performance she said "I can write for that little rascal. She can play a bitch!" In The Soap Opera Encyclopedia, Christopher Schermering writes, "Although Lisa was guilty of many lapses, nothing made her more hated by her audience of housewives than a simple sequence in which she hired a maid to clean house and went gallivanting about town. When mother-in-law Nancy complimented Lisa on what a nice home she had made for Bob, audiences were furious." A scheming "vixen" in her early years, TIME magazine once referred to Lisa as a "superbitch" and the "most hated woman on TV." Since those days, Lisa has gone on to become a well-respected presence in Oakdale (the fictional town in which As the World Turns is set), often offering advice and