The Edge of Night's casting director, Ruth Levine, happened to meet film actress Kim Hunter at a cocktail party just as head writer Henry Slesar had devised a storyline about "an aging movie star who drinks too much and has a messed-up love life.

"[1] Hunter, known for portraying Stella Kowalski in the original production of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire,[2] and later winning both an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture for the 1951 film adaptation,[3][4] initially declined the short term role of Nola Madison.

[1] Slesar later came up with an extended storyline in which Nola would play a witch in a horror film, and a side plot in which she would disguise herself as an old woman and drug some of the other characters.

[6][7][9] J. Bernard Jones of Daytime Confidential explained that "Head writer Henry Slesar shrewdly wrote Nola as a combination of Stella Kowalski from A Streetcar Named Desire and Norma Desmond [from Sunset Boulevard]: drunk, neurotic, jealous, egotistical, vengeful, lonely, sad, murderous, tragic and ultimately broken.

With her career in decline, Nola has resumed drinking, and she obsesses about Owen's infatuation with police detective Deborah Saxon (Frances Fisher).

Movie star Trent Archer (Farley Granger) is hired to play opposite Nola, but quits in fear as the film set is plagued by accidents and strange occurrences.

He becomes erratic and prone to violent outbursts, and nearly pushes his wife Nicole Cavanaugh (Jayne Bentzen) over a penthouse railing on New Year's Eve.

Still under the influence of Nola's drugs, Miles is taunted by a hallucination of his deceased wife, and becomes convinced that Nicole is having an affair with Police Chief Derek Mallory (Dennis Parker).

Nola and Eliot are furious that his bitter wife, newscaster Margo Huntington (Ann Williams), is intent on punishing him by not giving him an easy divorce.

Proof surfaces that Mrs. Cory purchased illegal drugs, and Derek vows to get Nola even though Deborah and Miles decline to file charges.

Eliot's alibi is challenged but his lover, revealed to be Raven Alexander (Sharon Gabet), makes a dramatic entrance into the courtroom.

Hunter does bravura work in an episode that was a brilliant denouement to one of Edge's most confounding murder mysteries and magnificent send-off for one of the series' most memorable characters and actresses.