Kelly Ripa Constantly Feared Being Fired From 'All My Children'

Kelly Ripa was "terrified" of being fired from All My Children.

The 54-year-old star made her name when she was cast as Hayley Vaughan on the ABC daytime soap opera in the early 1990s.

While she enjoyed the security of the regular work, she was always conscious of being written out at a moment's notice.

Speaking on Live with Kelly and Mark, she said: "A steady gig has always appealed to me. I liked the weekly guarantee of the soap. Most people, they get on a soap and their goal is to get right off a soap, and I just settled right in there. I liked the steadiness of it. It just gave me a layout of my life over the next year."

"But anything can happen in a soap. Every 13 weeks you can be fired. It was terrifying," she stated.

Ripa eventually left her role on the now-defunct soap opera in 2002 - by which time she had already started hosting Live! - and explained that her time on the drama series taught her not to become too "attached."

"People were very emotional about packing up the studio, packing up their individual cubby spaces in the common office. Everybody was very emotional about it, and I had a detached reaction to packing things up and getting out. It's from years of acting. No matter where I was, my home was always temporary," Ripa explained.

The daytime TV host added, "I always knew it was temporary. I didn’t know how temporary it would be. But I knew it was a temporary space, so I never allowed myself to attach."

All My Children initially aired from 1970 until 2011 and made a star out of Susan Lucci, who played matriarch Erica Kane throughout its entire run, before making a brief online return for six months in 2013.