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Performer of the Week

Tamara Braun (Carly, GENERAL HOSPITAL)

In a record year of eight lead actress nominees in this year's Emmy parade, several key names were conspicuously missing - one was Tamara Braun's. If you doubt that claim, you obviously missed GENERAL HOSPITAL the week that Carly was hanging onto a thread awaiting news of her kidnapped offspring.

Putting the emotional needs of her children's father above her own, Carly halted Sonny's self-destructive helplessness. "You want to know how to thank me?" she asked with understated authority, cupping her man's tear-strewn face in her hand. "I would know if Michael were gone from this world. I would feel the loss...It's not there, Sonny. That hole is not there."

Carly's hope was rewarded - partly. Youngest son Morgan was returned safe and sound, but her eldest Michael, was still missing. As Carly club to a miniscule fiber of hope, Braun guided us through every painful turn that Carly's mind took, making us squirm when her nightmare came true and received worked that Michael wouldn't be coming home.

There's not a catchphrase you can use to describe the way Braun throws herself into her incarnation. Much like her firebrand character, she simply is. She is strong. She is vulnerable. And she does it simultaneously so that while we sympathize with Carly's maternal pain, we also admire her fierce determination as she struggles to pick herself up and keep a candle of hope burning only as a mother could.

Tamara, we miss you already.

Soap Opera Digest April 5, 2005