Soap veteran Denise Alexander, who played Laura’s mother Lesley on General Hospital along with a lengthy stint on Days of Our Lives, has passed away at the age of 85, according to Soap Opera Digest.
Alexander first gained fame when she joined the cast of NBC’s Days of Our Lives in 1966 as Susan Martin. (She also married her Days co-star Richard Colla, with the two remaining together until Colla’s death in 2021.) Alexander stayed on Days until 1973, when she shocked the soap world by hopping over to ABC’s General Hospital.
There, she played Lesley Webber, mother to Genie Francis’ Laura. Alexander’s Lesley was the driving force behind many of GH’s major plotlines in the 1970s, and Alexander earned a Daytime Emmy nomination for best actress in a daytime drama in 1976. Lesley was killed off in a car crash in 1984, and Alexander took a role on the NBC soap Another World, but she returned to GH as Lesley in 1996, mysteriously resurrected.
She continued on General Hospital off and on until 2009, popping back in for special episodes every few years after that. Her last appearance on the show was in 2021.
Francis credits Alexander with helping her develop as an actor, she tells TV Insider: “I loved her. She loved me. I stole her good stuff. When I look at myself sometimes on television… I have been kind of taken aback because I realized I just did Denise… I was so young, she imprinted on me. And some of my style of acting was directly imprinted on me by Denise Alexander. And she was very, very good to me as I was growing up.”
