Jane Elliot is a proud "failed" retiree. The General Hospital star has been part of the beloved soap opera since 1978, starring intermittently as Tracy Quartermaine, a character she originated and has played for a whopping 1,630 episodes. In its legendary run, General Hospital has aired over 15,000 episodes, has been around since the early 1960s, and per IMDb, has featured over 4,000 credited cast members, so fans are no strangers to a revolving door of new and returning cast members.
Jane, speaking with Woman's World this week, opened up about her own departures and returns to the show, having first made an exit in 1980 before returning and exiting several times since then, her longest stretch being from 2003 to 2017. Addressing her 2017 exit, which lasted about two years, she joked: "I'm a failed retiree."
"I thought I needed a break," she recalled, noting: "I was a single parent. I raised two children on my own, and I raised them exclusively on acting money. I no longer had children to raise, and I was 70. I had my pension and my Social Security. I thought, 'Oh, yay. I don't need this job anymore. I can retire.'"
However, retirement "wasn't what I thought it would be," she admitted. "I was like, 'But wait, I really like that job! And whether I need the money or not, I want to keep doing it,'" she continued, adding: "I luckily had a wonderful boss who kept a place at the table for me and didn't replace me. Didn't hire someone else to play the part."
Among one of the recent episodes that Jane filmed was the funeral for Dr. Monica Quartermaine, some months after the actress behind the character, Leslie Charleson, also passed away aged 79 and had her own memorial services. Jane, whose character was Monica's sister-in-law, told Variety of filming the funeral scenes: "It was very, very difficult to play her alive when she had already passed in real life. It extended the mourning because we had to keep her alive when she wasn't," and emphasized: "I had to mourn her death twice."
"Leslie left two voids in my life," the actress, 78, further shared. "She left a void as an acting partner and a friend. Leslie and I knew each other for 60 years. We met in 1965. I was 18 and she was 20, and she was dating a boy in a play that I was in in New York City. She would come to the theater on Saturdays and hang out in my dressing room and wait for him to be done so that they could go out to dinner between shows. We would sit and gab, and she'd watch me put on my makeup. We had a lot of shared experience and stuff to talk about. And then we lost touch. And in 1978 I got hired to play Tracy [on General Hospital] only to discover that I was to play her sister-in-law."
"She was an integral part of my life… It's hard enough to mourn somebody's death once, but then to do it again. One was obviously the person, and the other was the character, but at a certain point they blended. You know, Monica was Leslie, and Leslie was Monica. I had shared experience with Monica, and I had shared experience with Leslie, so she left me twice."
Per People, Leslie died from "sequelae of blunt head trauma," a condition caused by a previous head injury, though it's unclear when she previously suffered head trauma. She was previously diagnosed with asthma, arthritis, atrial fibrillation, and normal pressure hydrocephalus, which per the Cleveland Clinic, is a condition that happens when cerebrospinal fluid builds up inside your skull and presses on your brain. The condition is most likely in people over 65, and it's often treatable and sometimes even reversible.