Best known as Luke to the 30 million television viewers who tuned in to Luke and Laura’s wedding on “General Hospital” in 1981, Anthony Geary went on to play his role for 37 years.
He died on Sunday at the age of 78 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where he had moved after retiring in 2015 from his legendary part credited for transforming daytime serialized drama and attracting vastly broader audiences in its heyday. The wedding episode remains the most-watched soap opera episode in history.
He also was an early “boy toy” for an older famous actress, Elizabeth Taylor, long before that became a trend of sorts, he disclosed on the “Wendy Williams Show.”
This was heady stuff for a kid born in 1947 and raised in Coalville, graduating from North Summit High School before majoring in theater on a full scholarship at the University of Utah, where he was discovered acting in a play and whisked to Los Angeles.
He was easily the Summit County seat’s most famous native.
“I had a happy childhood, and my family was always close,” he told People in 1980. “But early on they realized I wasn’t of this earth, that I wouldn’t follow my father’s lead. … In school I was always an artistic loner.”
His father, Russell, owned a construction business. He told The Hollywood Reporter that his mother, Dana, “taught me it was OK, that it wasn’t unmanly, to have emotions.”
Before landing the role of Luke that came to define him, he appeared in many of the more popular television shows of the time: “Room 222,” “All in the Family,” “The Partridge Family,” “The Mod Squad,” “Marcus Welby, M.D.,” “The Streets of San Francisco,” “Barnaby Jones.”
He also played many stage roles and had parts in other daytime shows, but he seemed to always gravitate back to Luke and “General Hospital.”
Geary earned eight Daytime Emmy awards as Luke Spencer after joining the soap in 1978. His last appearance on the show came as a cameo in 2017. By then, he lived in Amsterdam with his husband, Claudio Gama.
His death was a surprise following complications from a scheduled surgery several days earlier.
“It was a shock for me and our families and our friends,” Gama told TV Insider. “For more than 30 years, Tony has been my friend, my companion, my husband.”
“He was a powerhouse as an actor. Shoulder to shoulder with the greats. No star burned brighter than Tony Geary. He was one of a kind. As an artist, he was filled with a passion for the truth, no matter how blunt, or even a little rude it might be, but always hilariously funny,” said Genie Francis, who played Laura to his Luke over the decades.
Geary told The Hollywood Reporter that he always wanted to be an actor and kept a notebook from grade school through high school in which he logged every movie he saw. He rated each one and listed who acted in them, who directed them and often who wrote them.
He graduated from North Summit in 1965 among a class of 53 students before accepting the theater scholarship to the University of Utah that eventually led to his iconic role.