Soap fame came on fast for Steve Bond when he was cast on GH in 1983 as Edward Quartermaine’s illegitimate son, Jimmy Lee Holt. The job “completely changed my life,” says the actor, who is now mostly retired from show biz. He screen-tested for the role the day before he tied the knot with wife Cindy, with whom he’ll mark his 35th anniversary next year, and left in the midst of their honeymoon in Hawaii for a three-day trip back to California when GH summoned him for a second test. Fortunately, it was worth it; he was hired and Jimmy Lee quickly took off.
“I think it was a combination of things,” he muses now of the character’s popularity. “He was a bad boy, and the first scene I had was with Edward Quartermaine, the patriarch of the family. I show up at the door on a Harley-Davidson and I say, ‘Hey, Daddy, I’m here!’ Edward wanted nothing to do with me, so all of a sudden, that whole family had a foil. [Then-Executive Producer] Gloria Monty was brilliant. She created characters that people really responded to, believed in and got excited about.”
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In the days before social media, it was in-person contact with viewers that gave Bond a sense of his new stature. “Within two weeks of me being on the show, I went to my first personal appearance in New Jersey with Kin Shriner [Scott], [John] Stamos [ex-Blackie] and a bunch of other people,” he recalls. “My wife was there, and when we went to leave, security says, ‘We better put Cindy in the car first because it’s not going to be safe.’ In the time it took me to get from the exit to the car, [the fans] tore my watch off, they tore my tie, they were jumping on the car, and I’m sitting in the backseat looking at Cindy going, ‘What the heck happened?’ I mean, before that, I was supporting myself as a waiter! I went from being someone who was anonymous to someone who couldn’t walk down the street.”
That warm, albeit overzealous, reception was just a taste of things to come. But after four successful years in Port Charles, Bond elected to leave GH. “Daytime is a great job and it’s a wonderful place to be, but I’d always dreamed of being a successful film actor, and an opportunity came to star in a movie that all the young actors I knew wanted [to be cast in]. It ended up being called Magdalene, and Nastassja Kinski was the leading lady. It was supposed to be a movie that would sort of transition me into working as a film actor, so it was quite an opportunity that I left for. Unfortunately, the movie didn’t turn out because Hemdale [the distributor] was having financial problems. As I always say, God had a different plan for me.” One that outside of a year-long stint on SANTA BARBARA as fitness instructor Mack (brother of Robin Mattson’s Gina), didn’t include soaps.
Indeed, other passions began to take priority. “Basically, I kind of quit acting 20 years ago,” he explains. “I’ve been a passionate horse guy forever, and I trained my daughter, Ashlee, who’s one of the top equestriennes in the country, and we run a professional operation out of our house called Little Valley Farms. And also another thing that kind of fell into my lap is that I started developing commercial real estate. I built one building in Santa Monica and then I ended up building another one, so all of a sudden I found myself too busy and I put acting on the back burner. And the more I moved away from it, the less I wanted to audition. [Acting] kind of fell by the wayside, and the horses and the real estate kind of took over my life.”
Still, show biz stayed close to home. “At the same time I was distancing myself as an actor, my wife was becoming a very good producer,” he notes proudly. “She owns a distribution company that’s become very successful and has produced a ton of movies.” Including ENCHANTED CHRISTMAS, which will premiere on the Hallmark Channel on November 12 and features Bond in the role of Oliver, which his missus realized would be perfect for him. “Cindy said, ‘Honey, you need to play this part. He’s the owner of a real estate company — you do that in your sleep. You can play this!’ So, she talked me into doing it.” He shot an audition tape on his iPhone (“I wish we could have done that back in the day!”), Hallmark approved his casting, “and the next thing I know I’m on a set again,” he marvels.
CROWN MEDIA
Being part of the film’s shoot “was very exciting,” Bond enthuses. “The adrenaline, the flow — when you’re an actor and they say, ‘Action!’ it is an amazing feeling. That’s why people go through the machinations and the tribulations of trying to become actors, because the rush is so great. That never goes away and I enjoyed it.” Shooting in the picturesque Utah Rockies at the lush Zermatt Resort (which doubles in the movie for the hotel his character purchases) also wasn’t too shabby. “I’d never been to Utah, but it’s just beautiful.”
The project was even more of a family affair because his 26-year-old son, Dylan, is a producer on the film and also served as one of its two composers. “I’m very proud of him,” Bond beams. “It’s kind of divided [in our household]; Dylan’s a musician, Cindy’s in the movie business, Ashlee’s an incredible rider, and that puts pressure on me to produce horses that she’s able to win on! It’s kind of a nice mix.” But the animal-centric side may soon upset the balance. “I put Ashlee on a horse when she was months old, and the other day, Ashlee handed me her daughter, Scottie Ava, who just turned 1, and I took her for her first ride on a horse. It was pretty amazing.”
While appearing on-screen will continue to be the exception rather than the norm for Bond, he chuckles, “My wife is producing a lot and if she puts me to work, I cannot say no!” And he remains, as he puts it, “so grateful for not only what happened to me on GENERAL HOSPITAL, but the life that it created for me and the fans that enjoyed the character. There are no words to really say how thankful and appreciative I am.”
COURTESY OF STEVE BOND
DID YOU KNOW?
- Bond was born in Haifa, Israel, as Shlomo Goldberg.
- He was friends with Kin Shriner (Scott) for years before landing GH. “We’d go to the gym together, run together, and we had a bunch of mutual friends.”
- GH used a teleprompter at the time Bond was a cast member, but he couldn’t use it because Hebrew was his first language. “I learned to read from right to left, and when I looked at the teleprompter, my eyes would go to the right side of the screen.”
BOSS LADY
Bond’s GH boss, late former Executive Producer Gloria Monty, was known to rule the studio with an iron fist, but the actor says, “I never saw the wrath of Gloria Monty, personally. Gloria was amazing from many standpoints. As a professional, she demanded a lot. Obviously, she had a vision that was really successful. As a person, she was complicated. She could be very, very aggressive, and she could be very frank and not very complimentary. But to be honest, I never had any confrontations with her, maybe because I’m not a guy that looks like you want to pick a fight with! And I was always professional, I always came in prepared. The worst thing she ever said to me was something like, ‘What is it that you’re doing here?’, talking about a scene. She was trying to get me to understand that my interpretation of the scene was not from where she wanted it approached. So I would say, ‘Well, how do you see it?’ And she would give me her interpretation. She was a really good director and she would always open your eyes to a new way of expressing a scene.”
