Geary home for charity

Utah native Anthony Geary is coming home on Saturday for a good cause — to help raise money for the Utah Youth Village.

"I always try to do anything that has to do with children," said Geary, the longtime star of ABC's "General Hospital" who volunteers for charities benefiting kids, and AIDS and cancer research. "After 30 years in the business, it's always nice to give something back. I do what I can.

"The Youth Village is something that my sister, DeAnn, has been associated with for several years, and … that was good enough for me."

Geary first dreamed of becoming an actor while growing up in Coalville, where he still visits four or five times a year.

"I always wanted to be an actor. It was kind of the first thing that I announced to my mother," he said in a telephone interview with the Deseret News. "I sure didn't expect to be on a TV show for 30 years. That wasn't really on the radar at all.

"And as I think about it now, it still seems kind of amazing. It's been almost a one-role career. Although I've done other things, I'm sure Luke Spencer is what will probably lead my obituary, let's put it that way."

There have been times when the whole Luke-and-Laura phenomenon became more than he wanted to handle, but Geary has long since come to terms with all of that.

"I'd been working since I was 19. I started at the Valley Music Hall, actually, and the Pioneer Memorial Theatre," he said, before moving to Los Angeles in 1969 and getting his first TV role in 1970. He joined "GH" in 1978.

"And by 1982, suddenly a journeyman actor had become kind of, well, a cultural flash-in-the-pan is what everybody thought I was," he said. "And I really was unhappy with being identified with one role and not having any privacy whatsoever."

The 1981 wedding of Luke and Laura (Genie Francis) remains the most-watched event in daytime TV history, with more than 30 million viewers. And Luke-and-Laura mania was off the charts.

"I kind of fell into it at the peak of its popularity," Geary said. "And, for some reason, the character that I was given became a kind of icon of that time, I suppose."

He left the show and spent eight years doing mostly theater and "a bunch of B-movies that haunt me on late-night TV," Geary said with a laugh.

When he left the soap opera in 1982, "I had no plans to go back." But then "GH" producer Gloria Monty talked him into returning to play Luke's cousin, Bill.

"I played that for two years until the audience demanded Luke back. And by then I was so bored with Bill I said, 'Let's do Luke again,' " he said. "And since then, I really have not looked back. I have had a wonderful run since '93 as Luke Spencer."

A run that he's still enjoying.

"I think if he weren't as bizarre and kind of as all over the planet as he is I would not have been able to play him for all this time. He still excites me," said Geary, who added that he's enthusiastic about a current "General Hospital" plotline that has introduced someone who may or may not be Luke's illegitimate son.

"We don't seem to be coming to the end of it yet," he said.

E-mail: pierce@desnews.com