Starr Quality

Soap Alum Kristen Alderson Is Grateful To Have Grown Up On Daytime.

- Mara Levinsky

“It’ll be five years in January, which is so bizarro,” says Kristen Alderson of her surprise decision to exit GH back in 2015. A daytime mainstay since she was cast as Starr on ONE LIFE TO LIVE at the tender age of 6 back in 1998, the actress notes, “It had been 18 straight years of me being on a soap opera. It was a crazy decision. I don’t know what came over me, but it was like an Oprah ‘Aha!’ moment, like, ‘This is my time to go.’ ”

A desire to nurture her life away from work prompted the choice, she explains. “[GH] wanted me to stay for three more years and I was fully ready to sign up. But my mom and brother had just moved back to Philly,” where Alderson was born and raised, “and I started to worry, like, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to deal with not having any family out here.’ And there were things going on back home that I didn’t want to miss out on — like, my cousin’s daughter had just been born and I wanted to watch her grow up, and my friends got shore houses over the summer, and I was like, ‘Okay, in three years, they’re, like, going to be getting engaged. That might not be there for me in three years.’ I really needed to take that time to live, like, a normal life, to kind of live through things that I knew wouldn’t be there later. I just followed my gut.”