Anthony Geary, Luke Spencer on ‘General Hospital,’ Dies at 78
Anthony Geary, the thoughtful 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.”
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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.”
Anthony Geary & Genie Francis got married as Luke & Laura on the ‘General Hospital’ episode that aired Nov. 16, 1981.
Courtesy Everett Collection
The most-watched soap episode of all time — and one of the most memorable moments in TV history — attracted 30 million viewers, featured as the villainess Helena Cassadine and inspired (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.)
In 1973, Geary was hired to play George Curtis, a rapist, on CBS’ The Young and the Restless. After six months, he was asked to re-sign — producers said they were going to “rehabilitate” his character — but he declined, thinking “it was about time I got this big film career going.”
That never developed, though he did get regular work on the Quinn Martin-produced shows Dan August, Barnaby Jones and The Streets of San Francisco, where he played a heroin addict in one of his proudest efforts. Meanwhile, he was studying acting with Lee Strasberg.
In 1974, he portrayed a psychotic killer who holds people captive in the ABC telefilm Sorority Kill, directed by Monty and taped over two nights.
Luke & Laura saved the world from the evil Mikkos Cassadine and his weather machine on ‘General Hospital.’
Curt Gunther/TV Guide/ABC/Courtesy Everett Collection
For G.H., Geary first auditioned to play Sen. Mitch Williams in a scene with Jane Elliot as Tracy Quartermaine but was deemed too young for the role. Luke was originally supposed to be killed off after Geary’s 13 weeks were up and then again after the rape of Laura, but both times the character was spared.
“As it turned out, [ABC head Fred Silverman] wanted Asher Brauner, the young man who was playing my sidekick, Roy DiLucca, for a nighttime show,” Geary recalled. “So at the last minute, they had Roy shot, and Luke survived.”
He sent Francis flowers in real life, too, after they shot their controversial scene.
When their wedding aired, Geary was 34 and Francis was 19. “The Luke & Laura relationship is as real to me as any I’ve ever had,” he told Access Hollywood in 2007.
In 1983, after Francis had exited the show, Geary “didn’t just leave General Hospital, I fled, telling a director that I worked with on the stage that I would rather put hot pokers in my eyes than [ever come back],” he remembered.
While away, he produced and narrated stories for children’s radio, played Octavius opposite Lynn Redgrave and in a 1984 PBS-BBC production of Antony and Cleopatra and starred in Jesus Christ Superstar onstage. But he went a whole year without an acting job.
Geary said he was all set for a role in ’s Salvador (1986) until the director learned he was a famous soap actor. The offer was rescinded.
“Nobody wanted Luke Spencer in their movie,” he said. “And I understand that now, because for those 30 seconds or whatever, somebody [watching] would say, ‘Oh, isn’t that that guy on …?’ And then they would be taken out of the film.”
He did get to play a rotten gambler opposite the Fat Boys in Disorderlies (1987), an eccentric scientist named Philo in the “Weird Al” Yankovic comedy UHF (1989) and a preacher in Scorchers (1991).
In 1991, Monty was returning to G.H. and asked him to rejoin her — but told him she didn’t want him to play Luke. So he came back “for a lot of money” and made certain his contracts guaranteed him a great deal of vacation time — he would only work about six months a year — and the right to say his lines the way he thought they should be said.
As Bill Eckert, Geary wore a brown beard and brown contact lenses, but audiences didn’t approve of the character, and Eckert would die in Luke’s arms in October 1993, making for a full-fledged Luke comeback.
On May 8, 2015, he announced that he was leaving G.H. for good, though he did return in May 2017 when Elliot was leaving the show. (Luke and Tracy had married, and in January 2022, she revealed that he had been killed in a cable car accident in Austria. But was it really an accident?)
Anthony Geary accepted his fifth Daytime Emmy for outstanding lead actor in a drama series in April 2006.
Kevin Winter/Getty Images
Arguably the most popular actor in soap opera history, Geary received the Emmy for outstanding actor in a daytime drama series in 1982, 1999, 2000, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2012 and 2015 and was nominated nine other times.
“The entire General Hospital family is heartbroken over the news of Tony Geary’s passing,” executive producer Frank Valentini said in a statement. “Tony was a brilliant actor and set the bar that we continue to strive for. His legacy, and that of Luke Spencer’s, will live on through the generations of G.H. castmembers who have followed in his footsteps.”
In addition to his husband of six year, survivors include his sisters, Jan Steele and Deann Geary, and his nephews, Brendan Steele, a professional golfer, and Dax Geary.
Asked in his TV Academy Foundation interview to describe his “proudest moment” as an actor, Geary recalled being at an awards event in Pasadena in the ’80s when he spotted a tiny woman in a large hat smoking a cigarette and realized it was Bette Davis.
“I had been a fan since I was a child, and I thought, ‘I cannot let this opportunity pass,’” he recalled. “So I summoned all my courage and walked over to her and said, ‘Miss Davis, I just have to tell you how important you have been to me as an actor, as a person, as a role model, as an idol,’ all of that. I put out my hand and said, ‘My name is Tony Geary.’ And she shook it and said, ‘I know your work.’ I didn’t need any more than that.”
