You've lived and worked in London and Los Angeles. What made  you choose New York City as the place to raise your family? 

All the people I know who have hightailed it out of here regret it.   Their kids all end up bored. I make a very big effort to get on the  train with both children twice a week. I take Trevor along with me  on auditions, I try to schedule them when he sleeps. On the  subway, if it's just me and Trevor, I can't tell you how kind  everyone is. I am always prepared to take my time on the stairs  with the stroller, but someone always ends up picking up an end  and helping me down the stairs. Today, for instance, a man  carrying a huge package in one hand used his other hand to help  me take the stroller up the stairs. I just looked at him and said,
"Well haven't you shown the entire subway up!" I'm always  reminded of Tony Randall who lives on the Upper West Side like we  do. One day we were crossing the park at 79th Street and he was  hitching a ride so we stopped to pick him up and give him a ride.   He said he never takes a taxi anywhere in New York City. The  entire city recognizes him, and when people stop to pick him up he
 is grateful to rely on the kindness of New York strangers. In all the  years he's lived in the city, he's never once had to pay for a taxi. 

What types of activities do you like to do with your children? 

I like to take the children to the Chelsea Piers children's gym because it's huge, it's intimidating. I like for my children to get a  sense that they're not the center of the universe. Here we are in  the 1990s, and we're very special parents with a troupe of care  givers, so children can't help but be spoiled. Everyday a new toy  comes out, and even if it's just a dollar yo-yo on the subway,  they're getting toys on a daily basis. 

Yours is a marriage of two cultures (you hail from the United  Kingdom, your husband is American). How has this circumstance affected the way you raise your boys? 

Hutch has a cross between an English and an American accent.  I've always said words to him in both accents; "This is how daddy would say it. This is how mommy would say it. You can choose."  He understands that his friends will be speaking one way, and he might sound different from them. For him, I prefer that he grows up speaking well, but I also want him to have an American accent.   It wouldn't suit him, growing up here and having a pseudo English  accent. You  want the road to be as easy as possible for your children; being different is wonderful, it's just not an easy road.  Individuality is wonderful, but I don't want my child to stick out. 

You and your husband, John Viscardi, own and operate a theater  in NYC, "The Essential Theater, Blah, Blah, Blah." How has the  experience of working with your husband changed now that you  have children? 

I've worked with John on many projects, where he's written something and I'm producing it in our theatre company or even starring in it . . . I love working with John, that's how we met.  John was a priest on "One Life to Live" and I was the bad girl who seduced the priest. They wouldn't allow me to defrock him on screen, so I had to defrock him off screen! However, there's a whole different aspect of working with him now that we have children. There are huge sacrifices and extreme exhaustion where one of us says, "I can't do this. One of us has to concentrate on  raising the children!" There are so many needs to fill, diapers to change, bottles to give. And of course the guilt of having a care giver is overwhelming, but once the children go to school and have lives of their own it will be much easier. 

Children love to dress up and put on performances. Between you and your husband, yours is a very theatrical household. What  types of performances do you have in your home? 

Hutch's favorite thing for us to do is for John to play jazz on the  piano, and we are all to be naked, of course. Then the dancing  starts, and the running around, and Hutch is screaming, "I'm  naked, Mamma's naked, Dadda's naked!" So instead of dressing up,  we take the clothes off. He's just now getting into imaginative dress up games. Sometimes he'll take a dish towel and swing it
 around his neck and be a knight with his plastic sword and then,  of course, I'll have to take a paper towel roll as my sword so I can duel with him. 

Life with two toddlers can be quite dramatic. You've played a  mother on various soaps throughout your career. How does the  fictitious maternal experience differ from being a real life mom?

In reality, it's much harder! I've played a mother on "One Life to Live" and on "Guiding Light." I played a mother with a pillow up my shirt as a belly, and then it was the real thing during my pregnancy with Trevor. All those women who were watching me with the fake pregnancy must have criticized me: "Oh that's not  how you do it, that's not how you sit down." 

How did you find working the high-profile soap circuit while you were pregnant? 

The hardest thing when you're working while pregnant, especially if you need to be photographed, is that you don't feel beautiful.  Even though a lot of people tell you that you look beautiful, you don't feel it. So it helped tremendously that I had a wonderful designer who provided me with gorgeous silk tunics, and of course
you have to work harder to make the camera love you. 

Can Fiona fans expect to see you return to daytime as the bad girl everybody (including clergy) loves ? 

I'm actually looking forward to a new daytime character. I could be somebody's mother, but I'd be a different creature now, perhaps a sassier matriarch busy on the phone gossiping rather than one of those younger mothers who's always in bed with someone different. But it might take a while for me to go back to the soaps, I was never the type of actress to jump from one show to the next. My characters are always too spicy, I have to let some time pass so that the audience recovers. 

Tell us about your latest endeavor, "Tea With Fi."

Well first off, I want to tell you that afternoon tea is really coming en vogue. This isn't your grandmother sitting around with a doily and a plate of sugar cookies. I call it the active tea. There's so much more to do when you're sitting at tea and having a conversation about delicate contract points. It's like acting; if you  have something to do, an activity, then you can pull off any scene. The act of making tea can diffuse so much tension. The program will be filmed on location at various New York City tea houses. There are so many different kinds of tea house settings. There's the precious tea house of the Village, the Alice and  Wonderland tea up on Madison Avenue and very stark, traditional Japanese tea houses downtown. The show will air five days a week, for about ten minutes a day, wrapping around the afternoon programming - romance, classic films. The program will begin as intersession programming, however, eventually it will be its own half-hour program. It's not at all a commentary about the movie (I can't bear that sort of thing). It's to accompany the movie.  They're also going to do an online feature where the audience can ask questions like, "Where was that tea house?" "What designer was Fiona wearing?" "How can I set up an afternoon tea with my girlfriends or associates?" So it will be somewhat interactive as well. Sometimes there will be guests of some recognition having tea with me. The program is geared towards women, and we'll be talking about . . . men. Of course we'll cover the history of tea, the medical benefits of tea, how to read tea leaves. Tea has always helped me through a crisis. If you're sobbing, and you go through the ritual of boiling the water, letting the tea brew in a pot, you realize that you've just made it through ten minutes, and you have a nice hot cup of tea waiting for you. 

"Tea With Fi" isn't your only project on the American Movie Channel. urrently you narrate "Royal Families of the World," which airs at 7:30 PM on Sunday evenings. What do royal families have in common with ordinary folks? 

Well, we all eat, sleep, put on clothes. The difference lies in the types of foods we eat, whether we put on cashmere or silk or furs, or plain polyester. Royalty has more choices than common folk. But interestingly, not all the royal families we've interviewed are living in luxury. Certain families have name and title and they have heritage, but they don't have the money that's expected of them. Others are quite fascinated with ordinary life. The King of Spain, for example, is quite a public character, but what he likes to do best is get on his motorcycle and speed down the road in hopes of getting stopped by a policeman. He likes to help motorists who are having car troubles. He'll stop and change a spare tire for someone stranded on the road. Of course when he takes off his helmet, the motorist usually faints at the sight of the king. 

In addition to your theater endeavor and your television programs, you also teach the graduate course "Understanding Daytime" at the School of Film and Broadcasting. It must be fulfilling to give back to the NY acting ommunity which has garnered you with so much success. 

I came to New York at the age of 16 for ballet and got involved with acting at 22. I booked jobs blindly without knowing any of the business side. I wanted to get involved with soaps. I was intrigued by the passionate story lines and how beautiful the women were, how handsome the men were, but I didn't know how to get involved with daytime television. At the time, soaps were taboo; certainly teachers weren't out there offering guidance on soap opera acting. When you're working daytime you really need to be knowledgeable about the business side, you need to know how to work the publicity machine, how to deal with going out and eating lunch and having disgruntled fans spit in your food because your character is involved in some heavy story line. Serials are becoming increasingly popular. There's even a soap channel on cable where you can watch your old favorites. I have seen young actors come in and lose their jobs over the wrong reasons, because they weren't ready for the life changes. My class addresses these issues. And it's a wonderful experience. 

You make an important point about negotiating the business side of acting with all of its creative rewards. Yet the glamour of the industry, especially coming from the soaps, seems so alluring. Give us the scoop. Is living the life of a soap star as glamorous as it appears? 

Sure it's glamorous when the events come around, but even at events you can be sitting there for hours and you're hungry and you want to go home. Arrivals are glamorous -- finding the camera and seeing your peers and colleagues is exciting -- but there's a lot that leads up to that moment. 

You are both an accomplished stage and television actress. Which medium gives the most thrills? 

Nothing beats being live on stage. When it's a flop, or you don't deliver a line correctly, there's no greater hell. But when the audience loves you, it's such a high. 
 

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