ABC/Scott Kirkland
Laura Wright (l.) with Jacklyn Zeman.
Today, May 9, marks one year since the passing of General Hospital icon Jacklyn Zeman, beloved for playing Barbara Jean “Bobbie” Spencer for over 45 years. Her onscreen daughter’s portrayer, Laura Wright, was asked recently about the tribute GH paid to both the actress and the character during Coastal Entertainment’s Ladies of GH event.
“We can always honor Jackie, right? Not just a moment…but when we did Bobbie’s death on New Year’s Eve, that was a rough week,” she confided to the audience in Long Island. “We shot all of the episodes within four days. Everything…I don’t know, nine episodes, which is good when you do those kinds of heavy scenes, then you’re not spreading it out for a couple weeks.
“As intense and difficult as it was, it was done in four days, but I think everyone felt it, took it home the whole week,” she shared. “We knew it was going to be heavy. And we were talking about this yesterday, the funeral for Bobbie…when you walked on set, it was about Jackie. Her photo was up, the cast that was there and any other time that you would be doing anything with a cast like that, Jackie would’ve been there. So she was in spirit.”
It was a hard grouping of scenes for everyone but then something magical happened when they finished shooting them. “When we all left work that day, there was a beautiful rainbow outside,” Wright smiled. “So it was a really special day.”
Zeman was a powerful force for so many years for the entire cast and the GH tribute was a way for them to process their grief — grief the audience has felt as well. Dealing with those kinds of emotions would of course take a lot out of the actors and Wright explained how they dealt with it.
“I just think we all went home and took some hot baths and had a glass of wine and went to bed,” she continued. “I mean, depending on [whether you were] coming back the next day, the decompressing or really letting it go, it is not so easy and you almost don’t want it to be completely gone because then you’d have to start from scratch [to get into those intense emotions of grief]…the next morning. So you kind of just live in that space halfway a little bit until it’s over.”
