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

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."

Kelly 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"

She added: "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.

"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.

Kelly previously reflected that it was all a "happy accident" that she had landed the job on the soap opera in the first place, and it "changed the trajectory of her life" for good.

During a reunion special hosted by Entertainment Weekly, she said: "I wound up getting the job. But it was really - I mean, talk about happy accidents. It really was a happy accident.

"It changed my life. It changed my entire life - not just my acting life, but changed the whole trajectory of my life."