Hillary Bailey Smith

Hillary Bailey Smith is an American actress born on May 25, 1957, in Boston, Massachusetts. She attended Dana Hall School, Pine Manor College, and Sarah Lawrence College, where she performed in off-Broadway and Broadway productions as a senior, including The Heidi Chronicles. Her Broadway career spans credits that also include An American Hero, with her stage work documented between 1899 and 1989.

Smith made her soap opera debut in 1982, portraying Kit McCormick on The Doctors. The following year, she took on the role of Margo Hughes on As the World Turns, a part she held from 1983 to 1989. After the birth of her son in 1988, she took maternity leave from acting before returning to daytime television to originate the role of Nora Gannon Buchanan on the ABC soap opera One Life to Live in 1992. She remained with that series until its cancellation in 2012 and later reprised the role in the short-lived 2013 reboot on The Online Network. In 2017, Soap Opera Digest and Deadline Hollywood reported that Smith would reprise the role of Nora on General Hospital.

Her performance on One Life to Live earned her the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series in 1994. Between 1994 and 1995, she also appeared in the NBC sitcom Something Wilder. Smith served as a producer and cast member on the web soap Venice: The Series, in which she played the character Guya, and won a Daytime Emmy as a producer on that project in 2014. That same year, she worked as a supervising producer on the web series Beacon Hill and received a 2015 Daytime Emmy nomination for Outstanding New Approaches Drama Series.

Smith was born Hillary Bailey and married Philip Webster Smith III in 1983, having first met him at age 14 and reconnecting with him at a friend's wedding before their marriage. The couple have two children, a daughter named Courtney and a son named Philip, who briefly appeared as her on-screen son on As the World Turns during his infancy.