Genie Francis2009 Soap Opera Hall of Fame Inductee
- Alice Dennison, Family
- Laura Vining Webber, General Hospital
- Patricia "Tyger" Hayes, Bare Essence
- unknown role, Glitter
- Jenny Bernard, Hotel
- Melinda Jenkins, Hotel
- Diana Colville, Days of Our Lives
- Ceara Connor, All My Children
- Ceara Connor, Loving
Her father, Ivor Francis, a Canadian actor of English descent, was on the Gloria Monty-directed soap opera Bright Promise in the early 1970s, a few years before his daughter would work for her. He died in 1986 from the effects of multiple strokes. He played a brief role on General Hospital as an adoption counselor when his daughter was also on the show. Her mother, Rosemary Daley, is a former actress/model of Lithuanian descent. Genie is a confirmed Catholic. She has an older brother Ivor Jr., a younger brother Kenneth, and an older half-sister Shelley from her father's first marriage.
Genie met actor/director Jonathan Frakes while filming the television show, Bare Essence. After meeting again during the filming of the miniseries, North and South, Genie and Jonathan started dating in 1985. They became engaged in 1986, and married on May 28, 1988. The couple have two children, Jameson Ivor Frakes, born in 1994, and Elizabeth Francis Frakes, born in 1997. They have just recently moved from Belfast, Maine to Beverly Hills, California.
Genie's acting career started at the age of 13 with a guest appearance on the Aaron Spelling primetime series Family playing Alice Dennison, an unfriendly classmate of Kristy McNichol's Buddy Lawrence, in 1976. Even with only one professional acting credit to her name, she followed that with her most famous role, that of Laura Webber Spencer on General Hospital, a role in which fans got to watch her grow from a young teen of 14 into a young woman.
When Monty took over the producer position on the ailing show and decided that the dramatic focus should be on the younger characters, Douglas Marland wrote a daring story in which the confused, immature Laura took an older man as a lover. When her lover David Hamilton taunted Laura with the fact that it was really her mother that he loved, Laura accidentally killed him, and her mother took the rap for the murder.
Her ferocious, highly emotional performance at fifteen amazed her peers and, through word of mouth, hordes of teenagers were brought into the General Hospital audience. The highly melocramatic storyline was beautifully juxtaposed by a sweet, puppy-love romance with Scotty Baldwin (Kin Shriner). The ratings took off.
Then Pat Falken Smith, well known for her rape stories on Days of Our Lives, took over and wrote a highly ambiguous, controversial storyline in which Laura would fall in love with her rapist-seducer, Luke Spencer (Anthony Geary). The chemistry between Francis and Geary was undeniable, adn when "the powers that be" got around to calling the rap a seduction, Francis felt - and justifiably so - that her highly skilled performance as a rape victim had been negated.
The series of stories would bring her instant stardom though. A series of Luke-and-Laura-on-the-run stories would make Luke and Laura an international phenomenon and bring General Hospital unprecedented ratings. The stories sealed forever Luke and Laura as the most popular super couple in daytime history and brought them appearances on the covers of TV Guide, Us Weekly, and People magazines.
The television couple wed on November 16, 1981, with 30 million viewers tuning in to make this episode the highest-rated hour in soap opera history.
Francis was exhausted. For five years she had appeared almost daily, learing 50 pages of dialogue everyday along with her high school tudor on the set. She had no personal life at all, and felt that her whole adolescence and teenage years had been skipped. While she was in the midst of her tumultuous affair onscreen, she had not even been kissed in real life. At the peak of her success, Francis left the show in December 1982 to try her hand at primetime television and to take a brief break from the life of a soap opera actress. Her last scenes as Laura showed Laura disappearing in the fog while being trailed by a kidnapper.
Soon after, she landed a contract from CBS which included two big-budget TV movies and a series pilot. She landed the starring role in the made-for-TV movie, Bare Essence. The movie received high ratings, putting an end to the speculation that a former daytime actress could not lure a large primetime audience. When the movie was opted for a weekly series by NBC, she found herself starring in her own series. Sadly, Bare Essence, was not a success, being unable to capture the impact the movie had made, most in part due to lethargic writing that never was able to showcase the talent Francis had at all.
She decided to take time off to study and moved to New York, also hoping to launch a career on the stage. Genie had remained a fan favorite and viewers of GH wanted her back. GH offered a huge salary for thirty appearances and despite her desire to work on the stage, she agreed to come back. Fans were delighted when she returned to General Hospital on November 14, 1983. Her return was brought about to coincide with the departure of Luke when Geary decided to leave the series. During her first week on the show, the ratings jumped, adding three million viewers to the GH audience. When her limited run ended, Francis stayed true to her theater ambitions and returned to New York. She would return to General Hospital for one more brief visit in November 1984, but her work during this time was mostly on the stage and in primetime television.
She co-starred in the hit ABC miniseries, North and South (Books I and II), as the good Southern sister, Brett Main. Genie's extensive television work also included recurring appearances on Murder, She Wrote. Later she was seen in the television movie, Perry Mason and the Case of the Killer Kiss, and in Heaven and Hell, the third North and South installment.
She also was lucky in finding work on the stage where she has appeared in Crimes of the Heart and See How They Run. In 1991, Ms. Francis appeared in the Williamstown Festival Theater production of Defying Gravity. That same year, she made her New York City debut in The Baby Dance at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in Greenwich Village. She also appeared in a Comedic Curtain Raiser at Manhattan Class Company for their festival of One Acts, called "The Group."
Through the years, other daytime soaps have pursued Francis because of her tremendous popularity. She appeared on Days of our Lives as Diana Colville from 1987 to 1989 and on All My Children as con artist and incest victim Ceara Connor Hunter from 1990 to 1992. She reprised her role as Ceara on Loving in November 1991. She then returned to GH in 1993. In 1994, when Francis fell pregnant with her first child, the pregnancy was written into the show and Genie took six weeks off for maternity leave. However in early 1997 when she fell pregnant again, she took a much longer absence from the show, staying away for nearly a year and a half.
In September 2002 she abruptly left General Hospital following ABC's refusal to work out a contract she wanted.
In June 2006, Francis began negotiating with the casting directors on the show in returning to the role of Laura Webber Spencer for a limited run through November. She returned to the show with spectacular fanfare to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Luke and Laura's wedding. The magic of Luke and Laura was recaptured, and the reunion garnered the show more publicity than it had seen in years. Though she reprised the role for only one month, Francis's stint was so successful that she garnered a Daytime Emmy Nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series, which she ended up winning in June 2007. "Oh my goodness!" she said. "Thank you so much. I am overwhelmed. I've waited 31 years for this moment."
In December 2007, Francis had a starring role in the Hallmark Channel movie, The Note, which earned her critical acclaim.
Genie Francis returned to General Hospital in August 2008 to reprise her role as Laura Webber Spencer. Francis told the AP, "It's a mother-daughter story. Years ago when I started playing the character as a 14-year-old girl, it was a mother-daughter story, only I was the daughter. So it's kinda cool this is full circle. It's nice to come back for visits. General Hospital is my home." She continued, "I would stay on, but General Hospital honestly doesn't seem to want that relationship with this character at the moment," said Francis. "They want little short doses during sweeps periods. It's not entirely up to me. I'm thrilled and delighted my audience stands behind me. If they didn't, you can be sure I wouldn't get to come back for these visits." Laura's character was written off as returning to France for treatment for her illness.
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