Anthony Geary, Luke Spencer on ‘General Hospital,’ Dies at 78
One-half of the ultimate soap supercouple with Genie Francis, he won a record eight Daytime Emmys and starred on the ABC daytime drama over a 40-year span.
Anthony Geary, the thoughtful General Hospital actor who as the complex Luke Spencer raped and romanced Genie Francis’ Laura Webber Baldwin on the way to an unprecedented eight Daytime Emmy Awards and soap opera superstardom, has died. He was 78.
Geary lived in the Netherlands and died Sunday of complications from a scheduled operation in his adopted country three days earlier, the website TV Insider reported. “It was a shock for me and our families and our friends,” his husband, Claudio Gama, said. “For more than 30 years, Tony has been my friend, my companion, my husband.”
A native of Utah, Geary came to Los Angeles with the help of actor Jack Albertson, guest-starred on the fifth episode of All in the Family and was a regular on the daytime dramas Bright Promise and The Young and the Restless before G.H. legend Gloria Monty approached him about coming to Port Charles, New York, in 1978.
“In my first meeting, I said to her, ‘I hate soap operas,’ and she said, ‘Honey, so do I, and we’re going to change all that,’” he recalled in a 2007 chat for the Television Academy Foundation website The Interviews.
The producer-director told Geary that G.H. was going to create a role for him, but it would only be written if he were going to accept it. “She knew how to talk to an actor. How do you say no to that?” he said.
She described Lucas Lorenzo Spencer as “an antihero, a person who does all the wrong things for the right reasons. He would be a man of action; he wouldn’t be sitting around drinking coffee and talking about who was sleeping with whom. She wanted this character to cause a lot of trouble for a lot of people.”
Geary signed on for 13 weeks, and Luke, a hitman with ties to the mob, made his first appearance on G.H. on Nov. 20, 1978, reuniting with his younger sister, Bobbie (Jacklyn Zeman), with whom he was raised in a Florida brothel. When that contract expired, he signed another one for six months.
On the episode that aired Oct. 5, 1979, Luke, in a scene late at night at the Campus Disco he managed, told Laura, who was married to Scotty Baldwin (Kin Shriner) at the time, that he was going to be killed and was in love with her.
“It’s like some kind of sickness inside me, it’s eating me up, I can’t concentrate on anything,” he said to her. “And in my business, that’s dangerous, baby. You got me between two worlds that don’t mix.”
With the Herb Alpert song “Rise” playing in the background, he raped her.
The incident was framed back then as a romanticized “seduction” of Laura, and he would bring her flowers in the hospital. Luke & Laura would become a steamy supercouple, and after teaming with Robert Scorpio (Tristan Rogers) to rescue humanity from the Ice Princess weather machine, they wed at the mayor’s mansion in thawed-out Port Charles on Nov. 16, 1981.
“The two young people before us, through their love for one another, remind us of what it is that makes life precious to all of us — love, loyalty and courage,” the officiant said. “Together in the face of extreme danger to themselves, they overcame powerful forces that sought to destroy Port Charles and its people, even the entire world.”
The most-watched soap episode of all time — and one of the most memorable moments in TV history — attracted 30 million viewers, featured Elizabeth Taylor as the villainess Helena Cassadine and inspired Princess Diana (who had own famous wedding four months earlier) to send the actors champagne.
“He spoiled me for leading men for the rest of my life,” Francis wrote on X. “I am crushed, I will miss him terribly, but I was so lucky to be his partner. Somehow, somewhere, we are connected to each other because I felt him leave last night. Good night sweet prince, good night.”
Geary exited the drama at the end of 1983, only to return full-time in 1991 — not as Luke but as his lookalike cousin, Bill Eckert. Luke, naturally, would return as well, and Geary remained with G.H. until his final episode as a regular aired July 27, 2015.
“This show has been a huge part of my life for over half my life, and Luke Spencer is my alter ego,” Geary told TVLine that year. “But I’m just weary of the grind and have been for 20 years. There was a point after my back surgery last year where it became clear to me that my time is not infinite. And I really don’t want to die, collapsing in a heap, on that G.H. set one day. That wouldn’t be too poetic.”
One of three kids, Tony Dean Geary was born on May 29, 1947, in Coalville, Utah. His father, Russell, was a contractor and the owner of a construction business and his mother, Dana, a homemaker. “She taught me it was OK, that it wasn’t unmanly, to have emotions,” he recalled.
Geary said he always wanted to be an actor and kept a notebook from grade school through high school in which he logged every movie he saw. He rated each one and listed who acted in them, who directed them and often who wrote them.
In 1965, he was a member of the then-largest graduating glass in the history of Coalville’s North Summit High School — 53 students — then accepted a theater scholarship to attend the University of Utah.
As a sophomore in 1967, the blue-eyed Geary — who had done several musicals during a previous summer in Salt Lake City — starred in a college production of The Subject Was Roses opposite Albertson, who had received a Tony Award for his work in the intense Frank Gilroy drama two years earlier.
Albertson then asked him to tour with the play, and that brought Geary to L.A. (Albertson would reprise the role in an Oscar-winning turn in a 1968 MGM adaptation, with Martin Sheen portraying his son, as he had done on Broadway).
Geary made his onscreen debut on a 1970 episode of Room 222, then appeared on the All in the Family episode “Judging Books by Covers” as a guy named Roger who Archie (Carroll O’Connor) is convinced is gay. The installment was taped on Jan. 12, 1971, the night All in the Family premiered.
He also landed his first soap that year, playing a man who was incorrectly diagnosed as mentally impaired at birth and put in an institution on NBC’s Bright Promise. (Monty was a director on the show and Ivor Francis, Genie’s dad, played a doctor.)
