While Luke and Laura's love may never die, the same does not go for the characters on "General Hospital."
As is the case with any “death” on a soap opera, this news comes with a caveat. But this time it might really be for real. Really.
As TVLine reported, after more than 40 years as a character on one of the longest running and most popular network daytime soaps, "General Hospital," it seems the role of Luke Spencer, played by actor Anthony Geary beginning in 1978, is finally gone, kaput, dead.
On Monday’s episode, Luke came up in conversation only, as his current wife, Tracy Quartermaine (portrayed by Jane Elliott), gave Luke’s soulmate, Laura (Genie Francis), the bad news that Luke had died in a cable car accident in Austria. The off-camera death comes as Geary has not appeard on the soap since 2017.
It’s a soap opera – you expected a plain old heart attack?
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Many may know of the infamous “Luke and Laura” GH storyline from the early 1980s that rose far above the then much larger mass of afternoon soap operas. So popular did the fictional couple get that the wedding episode, which drew 30 million viewers in 1981, once landed in TV Guide’s "100 Most Memorable Moments in TV History” at #35.
Since then, the Luke character has gone through the usual cycles of good/bad guy, but in May 2015, Geary was finally ready to move on.
Upon his departure, Geary stated, “I’m just weary of the grind and have been for 20 years. I really don’t want to die, collapsing in a heap, on that GH set one day. That wouldn’t be too poetic.”
Of course, Geary reappeared for a few episodes in 2017.
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Geary had won his eighth Emmy, and like the mob, soaps pulled him back in. He had already said before his brief return, “If the story is interesting to me and it works out, I may come back to the show for six weeks or so. I really don’t think we have exhausted what [Luke] can do. It depends on the writers and how far they want to look.”
Since 2017, he’s been only a moved-on memory until this latest fictional death certificate.
The episode’s explanation strongly implied that Victor Cassadine (Charles Shaughnessy) engineered the “accident.” So, if you’re a betting person, you might not be surprised should the writers engineer Luke’s return some day in the future.
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