The crew and fans of General Hospital are mourning the loss of one of their own.
Over the weekend, Anthony Geary, the beloved actor behind the soap opera's Luke Spencer character, passed away unexpectedly. He was 78.
The late soap star, who exited General Hospital in 2015, originated the Luke role in 1978, and together with Genie Francis' Laura Webber became one of daytime's most popular couples.
Anthony passed away on Sunday, December 14 following complications from an operation three days prior. In a statement to TV Insider, Anthony's husband Claudio Gama, who he married in 2019, said: "It was a shock for me and our families and our friends. For more than 30 years, Tony has been my friend, my companion, my husband."
Though originally from Coalville, Utah, since his 2015 retirement, Anthony and Claudio had been living in Amsterdam with their beloved cat Max.
Anthony was born Tony Dean Geary on May 29, 1947, to a father who worked as a contractor and a mother who was a homemaker, and was raised Mormon. He changed his name from Anthony to Tony in 1978.
He made his first TV appearance in an episode of Room 222 and appearances on TV greats like All in the Family, The Mod Squad, The Partridge Family, and Barnaby Jones followed.
His first daytime role was on the NBC soap opera Bright Promise, in which he appeared from 1971 to 1972, and he then had a six-month stint on The Young and the Restless.
He was hired on General Hospital in 1978 for what was initially meant to be a 13-week story arc, as Luke, a hit man and rapist who fell in love with and subsequently married his victim, Laura. "The relationship between Luke and Laura was always very real, very realistic, like a real relationship, but the circumstances were absurd," Genie told ABC News in 2015.
Anthony and Genie's chemistry was such that their pairing became a cultural phenomenon, so much so that their 1981 wedding on the show was watched by a whopping 30 million people, the episode, which featured General Hospital fanatic Elizabeth Taylor as Helena Cassadine, becoming the most-watched episode in soap opera history.
"People still see daytime television as the bastard of the industry, but the fact that Elizabeth Taylor chose to come here because she's a fan must mean we're doing something right," Anthony told People in 1981 of the Hollywood legend's stint on the show, emphasizing: "It validated General Hospital for me."
Genie exited the show in 1982, before returning the following year, and then both she and Anthony exited together, save for a brief return in 1984. He rejoined the show as Luke's lookalike cousin Bill Eckert from 1991 to 1993, and later returned as Luke the following year, remaining on the show through 2015. He was on 1,995 of the series' 15,000 episodes.
"He was not created to be a heroic character," Anthony further told ABC News of Luke in a 2015 Nightline episode. "He was created to be an anti-hero and I have treasured the anti-side of the hero and pushed it for a long time."