Patrick Duffy, best known for playing Bobby Ewing in the '80s drama Dallas, will take the stage in Ventura on Tuesday, August 18, to play a lover. His real-life partner, Linda Purl from Happy Days, is starring opposite him.
They'll star in a one-off benefit performance of A.R. Gurney's play Love Letters.
Love Letters plays for one night only, on August 18, at Ventura's Rubicon Theatre. It's a benefit performance of the A.R. Gurney play.
At its peak, Dallas drew a weekly U.S. audience of 83 million. The show was a phenomenon in the 1980s and made the stars household names. Patrick Duffy played Bobby Ewing, the iconic and good-hearted hero of the show, and the antithesis of his scheming older brother J.R., played by Larry Hagman.
In real life, the two on-screen opposites were close friends.
"From the very first day that I met Hagman, he was my best friend," Duffy recalled.
Of the play Love Letters, Duffy said it's meant to be read.
"You read letters that you've written to them, and then they answer with that following letter back and forth from the time they're about eight years old to the time that one of them passes," Duffy explained.
Duffy and Purl don’t just have chemistry on stage. Their friendship unexpectedly turned to love during the COVID pandemic. Now, they're a couple.
"We'd pass in the halls every 20 years. 'Hi, how are you?'" Purl remembered. "But then COVID happened, and we're all in isolation. Patrick and I discovered this brand new thing called Zoom. We started to Zoom every night because there was nothing else going on. Our thoughts organically fell to deeper thoughts that informed our conversation. After a couple of months of that, Patrick said, 'I'm going to get in the car and drive to Colorado.'"
When he arrived at Purl's home, he wanted to make a good impression.
"I turned left and didn't go up the driveway. I pulled off the road, and I dropped my pants, which were shorts, and put on my good pants...a new shirt. I slicked my hair back, gargled, and sprayed a little cologne on. And then I drove up the driveway. Now all of a sudden we're standing six feet apart. And, you know, a little silence crept in, and I finally asked, 'May I kiss you?' And she said, 'Yes!.' And then I pulled in the garage, and we'd been together ever since.
Duffy doesn't mind being reminded of his time on Dallas, including the time he was killed off for an entire season and then returned in the shower. The storyline explained it by the entire previous season being a dream.
It's a storyline that was so far-fetched but widely watched that it has become a cultural touchstone.
"I have two wonderful things relating to Dallas," said Duffy. "Which is the shower scene and the 'Who Shot J.R.' scene. Those two things are so important to me that whenever anybody says anything about it, it's not an 'Oh dear me, what do they know?' I respond as if it's the first time I ever heard it."
