More General Hospital Stars Pay Tribute To Anthony Geary, Luke: ‘Magical, Creative, Fearless’
During his decades playing Luke on General Hospital, Anthony Geary worked with a great many talented actresses before his 2015 retirement. Genie Francis (Laura) shared that she was “crushed” by her longtime co-star’s passing, and Emma Samms (ex-Holly) told Soap Opera Digest that he gave her “confidence as an actor.” Days after Geary’s December 14 death, more of his former colleagues have penned heartfelt tributes to the Emmy-winning daytime legend.
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Finola Hughes joined the cast of GH as Anna Devane in 1985, but between her and Geary’s comings and goings from the soap, the pair only briefly worked together in the mid-2000s and didn’t share substantial scenes until the actress returned in 2012, when Anna and Luke became roommates and, briefly, lovers. “I was really nervous about working with him because I had never worked with him,” Hughes told Digest in 2020. “It was the same way I was nervous about working with Mo [Maurice Benard, Sonny]. With Tony, I realized that it’s like you step into a set with him, and there is this bubble of creativity that sort of sits between you, and he’s just all about the craft. He’ll do anything to make this thing in the middle of a scene better. So, it became talking about the craft, it became about talking about the scenes, which made my nerves go away.”
“The original,” Hughes declared of her co-star and dear friend on Instagram. “He took my breath away, so magical, creative, fearless. The thing of legend.”
The actress also remained in touch with Geary even after he retired from acting and moved to Amsterdam to live with his husband, Claudio Gama. “So glad I spent time with you and Claudio in Amsterdam for a couple of summers,” Hughes added. “The best host, conversationalist, deep thinker, witty, kind raconteur. Deeply mischievous; naturally, my kids adored you. Thank you, Tony, for the really, really good times, for sharing your heart and spirit. Claudio, I love you; we send our hugs. I’m always going to think of Tony out on the canals in his boat, slowly sailing through Amsterdam.”
Though Alexis was never romantically involved with Luke, the characters were long part of each other’s lives; back in the late 1990s, it was Luke who first discovered that Alexis was actually Mikkos’s Cassadine’s illegitimate daughter, Natasha, which is how he would often refer to her. Writing about Geary’s passing on Instagram, portrayer Nancy Lee Grahn called him “the actor I’ve learned the most from, loved to work with the most, revered the most, laughed with the most, was inspired by the most, got in the most trouble with, and had the most fun with.”
She also described him as “a masterful craftsman, a wordsmith, irreverent, curious, intelligent, endlessly generous, clever, a good troublemaker, dapper, delightfully naughty, a deep thinker, a great writer, editor, and pontificator, almost always on the right side of every issue, sexy, sagacious, defiant, determined, kind, and true.”
Grahn also credited Geary for helping bring her into the daytime industry, where she made her debut in 1978 as Beverly Wilkes on One Life to Live before becoming a soap star playing Julia Wainwright Capwell on Santa Barbara, and joining the cast of GH as Alexis Davis in 1996.
“If Tone Tone, as I called him, hadn’t leapt out of the generic soapbox of yore and broadened and expanded the definition and perception of a daytime performer, I doubt I’d have ever taken a job in daytime television,” the actress explained. “Tony was the pioneer of real, exciting, multi-dimensional, unpredictable acting in the daytime serial world. He brought excitement to the medium, and I was excited by it.
“Tony was my teacher, my champion, most daring partner in acting crime, and my cherished friend,” Grahn concluded. “I will miss him in the flesh, but will see that ‘F**k ’em’ twinkle in his eye forevermore.”
Tamara Braun, who now stars on Young and Restless as Sienna Bacall, has had an extensive career in soaps, beginning with playing Geary’s on-screen niece, Carly Corinthos on GH from 2001-05. “Tony was one of the best actors daytime ever had,” Braun declared on Instagram. “We didn’t get to work much together when I played Carly, and I was always disappointed by that because he was so brilliant. And kind. He was so kind to me. My heart goes out to Claudio and his family and to all who loved him.”
Before Michelle Stafford made her daytime debut as Phyllis Summers on Y&R in 1994, she was a big fan of GH — and of the legendary pairing of Luke and Laura. When she joined the cast of the show in 2014 as Nina Reeves, she told Digest of the prospect of working with Geary, “Oh, my God, it’s so insane. To be in a scene with him, I think I will just hyperventilate, I really do. The year that I won the Emmy for Lead Actress [2004] and he won for Lead Actor and we had to take a picture together, I was out of my body. I was out of my mind. I was standing next to him and it just freaked me out. He is one of the reasons [voice cracks] … he’s one of the reasons I’m an actor today. Truly he is.”
In her own Instagram comments following Geary’s passing, Stafford reiterated the role Geary had played in inspiring her to pursue an acting career. “As I have said before, this man is hugely responsible for me being an actor today,” she shared. “I watched Tony (on GH) when I was younger every day. My sister and I would watch, truly, every single day. As I would watch, I would think, ‘I want to do what he’s doing.’ He wouldn’t even really be in the scene, and you would see him in the background acting his ass off, being committed, pulling focus. He wasn’t even trying to upstage anyone, he just did. He couldn’t help it… he was a star. He made every scene he was in important. Every moment important. He loved acting. He loved art. You can imagine how I felt when I joined the show. I don’t really get starstruck. But I always was when I was around him.”
Geary retired from the show the year after Stafford began playing Nina, but before he left, the writers scripted a memorable encounter between Nina and Luke, set in Shadybrook Sanitarium. Noted Stafford, “I did one scene with him when I was on GH. I was coming out of my skin. I was extremely nervous. I remember I was sort of hiding off set, calming myself down. I had been so mesmerized by him for so many years, and I could not believe that I was acting with him.”
“Tony was honest, he was intelligent, he was real,” Stafford concluded her Instagram post. “I still can’t believe that I had the pleasure of knowing him. He didn’t even know that he had affected my life so deeply. I was too shy to tell him. How lucky are we all that he touched our lives on the screen. How fortunate am I that he equally touched my life in person and as a colleague. Godspeed.”
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