Denise Alexander, best known for playing General Hospital‘s Lesley Webber, died on March 5 at 85.
Born in New York City on November 11, 1939, and raised on Long Island, Alexander began acting as a child, appearing as Perry Como‘s daughter in Perry Como’s Chesterfield Supper Club in 1949 and other primetime series in the 1950s and ’60s, including Father Knows Best, The Danny Thomas Show, and The Twilight Zone.
She made her first feature film, Crime in the Streets, starring John Cassavetes, at 14, and did her fair share of radio work from the age of 6, telling We Love Soaps TV in 2010, “My dad, at one point, counted up the number I had done, and it was 2,500 radio shows. You would get out of school and go from one show to the next. They were 15-minute or half-hour shows, and you would sit around the table, read the script, rehearse a couple of times, and do it. Then you were out of there and onto the next one. And sometimes it was in the next studio. I did way more than people know I did.”
ABC
Alexander made her soap opera debut as Lois Adams on The Clear Horizon in 1960, but her big break came in 1966 when she was cast as Susan Hunter Martin on Days of Our Lives while still attending college at UCLA. As Susan, Alexander played a host of dramatic tales, including murdering her husband David Martin (played by Clive Clerk) in May 1967 after the death of their son.
“She started out as the bad girl and was thrown out of boarding school for smoking and drinking,” recalled Alexander to We Love Soaps TV. “The character caught on and sparked something with the audience, and that is how Susan became an important part of the show. I was there for almost seven years…. I had such a wonderful time on Days. It was like going to camp every day for me. I loved the people, loved the show, and loved what I got to do. They loved the character and liked me as an actor and gave me lots of neat stuff to do. I didn’t even ask for a vacation for five years because if I worked 365 days a year, I thought I was great. It was a very good time in my life.”
Everett Collection
In 1973, Alexander was in contract negotiations with Days when ABC offered significant perks to the actress to join General Hospital to play Dr. Lesley Williams. Though Alexander loved her time in Salem, she decided to leave. “It was [Days’ Executive Producer] Betty Corday who sent me to General Hospital,” Alexander told welovesoaps.net. “She said, ‘You must do this.’ So when I went to General Hospital, they didn’t have a character for me. They had a character that was coming in, a woman doctor who was going to have a romance with John Beradino [Steve Hardy]. And that was obviously wrong for me or for John, but they took the character and a couple of scripts of her arrival they had written and had to scramble to create a storyline.”
Alexander found great success in the role, earning a Daytime Emmy Award in 1975, famously becoming the mother of Laura Vining (Genie Francis) and foster mom to Blackie Parrish (John Stamos), and was a star player in the show’s rise to number one, thanks, in part, to the torrid Lesley, Rick Webber (Chris Robinson), and Monica Quartermaine (Leslie Charleson) triangle. In a 2010 interview with Soap Opera Digest, Alexander noted, I always say this, and I hope Leslie Charleson does, too: The first time that General Hospital ever went to number one in our era, it was on the Lesley/Rick/Monica storyline. It wasn’t Luke (Anthony Geary) and Laura. They went farther than anyone dreamed possible, of course, but that was a big triangle back then.” Lesley was killed off the soap in 1984, only to be resurrected in 1996, when she recurred until 2009. She appeared again in 2013, 2017, 2019, and 2021.
In an exclusive interview with TV Insider, Francis looks back on her relationship with Alexander. “I loved her. She loved me,” she says. “I stole her good stuff. When I look at myself sometimes on television, which I don’t do often because I don’t really like to watch myself, but I have seen myself do stuff and been kind of taken aback because I realized I just did Denise. So when I say I stole her good stuff, I’m saying I was so young, she imprinted on me. And some of my acting, some of my style of acting, was directly imprinted on me by Denise Alexander. And she was very, very good to me as I was growing up.”
Everett Collection
Alexander gave Francis a cherished keepsake that holds special meaning. “She actually gave me this lovely necklace,” Francis relays. “It’s like a little angel that’s standing on a cloud, and it’s on a pearl. It was a charm, and I wore it all the time. And then when my daughter wanted to become an actress when she was young, I said, ‘You’ve got to have your good luck charm.’ So I said, ‘I’m going to give you this little angel that’s been worn by two actresses, and now it’s yours.’ And so [daughter] Eliza [Frakes] has that, and it’s important to her too. And when I told Denise that, she cried. She was so excited to hear that what she had given me, I gave to my daughter.”
Alexander is survived by a stepdaughter, Elizabeth Colla, from her marriage to the late Richard A. Colla.
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