but sometimes she couldn't. Lately, she's been too much in control." She further stated, "What I don't like to play is this perfect person who is beyond human error." Development Early storylines The character did not undergo any real character development until almost two years into Francis's tenure as Laura. At the time, the series was facing cancellation and ABC brought on Gloria Monty as executive producer to save it. The new show runner's first order of business was to attract younger viewers by putting the teenage Francis' Laura front and center. Francis reminisced about Monty's conversation with her parents and her eagerness for more work in 1976. "She told my parents, ‘My idea is to use your daughter to capture this young audience.’ I was absolutely champing at the bit to prove myself as an actress, so I welcomed the opportunity with a lot of gusto." Suddenly, Francis found herself with a very demanding work schedule in which she arrived on set at 7:30 am and sometimes did not finish work until midnight. The young actress also had study 30 to 50 pages of dialogue daily. Instead of 2 shows a week, Francis was onscreen everyday. After Monty restructured the series around the character, Laura dreams of living independent from her parents and starts thinking about marriage. "Gloria put sex and romance into Laura's life and it bowled me over" Francis said. "Here I was doing things in front of 20 million people that I had never done in my own life." Some of the character's earliest storylines include running away to a commune at age 15, Laura's affair with David Hamilton (Jerry Ayres), who was in love with her mother Lesley. Only eight months after Monty's hiring, she had Laura kill Hamilton. Though teenagers couldn't relate to the murder itself, they could relate to the feelings of betrayal and Laura's strained relationship with her mother. Francis credited the storyline with allowing her to prove herself as an actress. "It was a romance with an older man." In a 1996 interview with Soap Opera Update, Francis said that the David Hamilton storyline "really did drive the character and make her who she was." According to Francis, during the ordeal Laura is "freaked out about looking good to the rest of the world because she was in the scandal sheets as a slut." In the summer of 1977, Kin Shriner