People PEOPLE General Hospital

GENERAL HOSPITAL: TV’S LONGEST-RUNNING SOAP 60 Years, 15,000+ Episodes, Countless Loves, Trysts & Plot Twists THE CAST TELLS ALL! Genie Francis, Maurice Benard & More PLUS On the Set…

HOW MANY SHOWS make 60 years?” marvels Genie Francis, whose General Hospital character Laura represents everything that has kept millions of fans tuning into the ABC soap opera for more than 15,000 episodes—and counting! Love, loss, a summer on the run from the Mob, the biggest daytime TV marriage in history, kidnappings, a murder trial, catatonia, going over a waterfall, a secret son with a member of the Cassadine clan, a machine that could freeze the world and a hunt that is still going on for the Ice Princess diamond is just a fraction of the drama Laura has triumphed over since 1977, when the innocent teen set Port Charles—and eventually 30 million TV watchers at her wedding to Luke–on fire. Through it all, Francis and thousands of other talented…

1 LUKE AND LAURA’S WEDDING (1981) It’s hard to explain the phenomenon of the mobbed-up disco manager Luke Spencer (Anthony Geary) and the married teenager Laura Webber (Genie Francis) going on the run in 1980, but by the time they walked down the aisle, 30 million people were tuning in, and Academy Award winner Elizabeth Taylor was crashing their nuptials. The TV milestone was filmed at the Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills (aka the Quartermaine mansion) on a sweltering day with every major GH actor in attendance. There were complications (including bees swarming the wedding cake), but there was no chance of the actors’ forgetting their lines, thanks to the show’s demanding executive producer. “In that situation where Gloria [Monty] was on location,” Francis recalls to People, “you were not going…

MEDICAL SHOWS WERE HAVING a moment. Dr. Kildare and Ben Casey were prime-time hits. ABC’s original concept for what became General Hospital wasn’t a serial; instead, each day a policeman, a doctor and a nurse would encounter a problem and solve it during the episode. The network only shifted gears and created a more traditional serial when it became clear that another network also had a medical-themed soap opera in the works. In fact, ABC’s General Hospital and NBC’s The Doctors premiered on the very same day—Monday, April 1, 1963. From the beginning, GH centered on the seventh floor of a hospital in an unnamed East Coast city (the locale wasn’t designated Port Charles until the ’70s) that seesawed wildly, and entertainingly, between medical emergencies—Lymphoma! Malaria! Murder by “Alkaloid X34”!—and the…

MOST OF THE ’70S reinforced the Great Soap Opera Verities: (1) Anyone who dies off-camera will come back to life (Phil Brewer in a plane crash in South America, Rick Webber in a plane crash in Africa); (2) any sex you regret will, of course, lead to pregnancy (Lesley Faulkner, Jeff Webber with Heather); and (3) good news is frequently a bad omen (Dr. Steve Hardy, after discovering Audrey still loves him, falls down a flight of stairs and is paralyzed). And one more thing: that baby your wife is about to have? Er, it’s just maybe not yours. Nurse Jessie continued her epic run of bad luck. Her romance with charming journalist Teddy Holmes came a cropper when he put her in debt and ran off with her 18-year-old niece. Then…

CALL IT ALCHEMY, CALL IT HARMONIC convergence. But don’t call it predictable: Whatever happened to General Hospital in the early ’80s—some once-in-a-lifetime combination of Gloria Monty’s fevered vision, Luke and Laura’s dynamic chemistry and a sudden, unquenchable American appetite for romantic fantasy—produced a daytime phenomenon unseen before or since. Luke and Laura’s summer on the run—pursued by not one, but two hit men, one in drag—drew legions of fans and eventually led to their Nov. 16-17, 1981, wedding, days that will live forever in soap history. (The landmark event remains the most-watched daytime event of all time.) Still, although it was the biggest General Hospital event of the ’80s, it was far from the decade’s only hallmark. Breaking free of the constraints of medical drama, Monty introduced wild plots, chief among…