Best known for her portrayal as Dr. Lesley Webber on “General Hospital,” actress Denise Alexander has died. At the time of her death, which was Wednesday, March 5, she was 85 years old. No official cause of death was announced at press time.
Born November 11, 1939, in New York City, Alexander made her daytime drama debut in 1960 playing Lois Adams in the short-lived series “The Clear Horizon” before making a name for herself in the role of Susan Hunter Martin on “Days of our Lives” in 1966. After contract negotiations hit a standstill in 1973 with the then-NBC soap, she went on to join the cast of “General Hospital.”
“It was Betty Corday [then executive producer of ‘Days of our Lives’] who sent me to ‘General Hospital,’” said Alexander in a 2010 interview with We Love Soaps. “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 [that] they had written and had to scramble to create a storyline.”
Speaking of her character on “Days of our Lives,” Alexander told the outlet at the time that the character was initially a bad girl who got thrown out of boarding school for drinking and smoking.
“The character caught on and sparked something with the audience, and that is how Susan became an important part of the show,” Alexander noted. “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.”
During her run on “General Hospital,” it was the Lesley, Rick Webber (Chris Robinson) and Monica Quartermaine (Leslie Charleson) triangle that drove fans wild before the era of Luke Spencer (Anthony Geary) and Laura Vining (Genie Francis), Lesley’s daughter.
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Alexander exited the daytime drama series in 1984, with Lesley being killed off. It wasn’t until 1996 that the show decided to bring the character back to the canvas, with the understanding she had been held captive for all those years by the resurrected Cassadines, a family that interfered in the lives of Luke and Laura during the 1980s. Alexander appeared on a recurring basis on the series from that point on through 2009, while also making drop in appearances in 2013, 2017, 2019 and most recently in 2021, following news that Laura had acquired two paternal half brothers — Cyrus Renault (Jeff Kober) and Martin Grey (Michael E. Knight).
In 1976, Alexander received her first and only Daytime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Actress in a Daytime Drama Series for her portrayal of Lesley Webber.
Outside of “The Clear Horizon,” “Days of our Lives” and “General Hospital,” Alexander would also appear on several other soap operas, including “Another World,” “Sunset Beach” and “Port Charles,” a spinoff of “General Hospital.” Meanwhile, her other credits included roles on “The Detectives,” “Hotel,” “This is the Life,” “Combat!” and “The Danny Thomas Show.” One of her more recent credits includes a 10-episode run on the digital drama “Pretty the Series.”
Speaking with TV Insider on the death of her TV mom, Francis said, “I loved her. She loved me.”
“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,” continued Francis. “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.”
Alexander is survived by her stepdaughter, Elizabeth Colla, from her marriage to the late Richard A. Colla, who passed on December 24, 2021, also aged 85.
Check out a promo for the show’s 56th anniversary special episode, aired in 2019, below.
