On the Anniversary of His Passing, We Look Back at the Too-Short Life and Remarkable Career of the General Hospital Scene Stealer Who Died by Suicide at Just 52 Years Old
If you’re a soap fan, you go ahead and love your favorite stars and love ’em hard, because you never know what they might be dealing with in their personal lives. Case in point: Daytime Emmy winner Gerald Anthony, who played Marco Dane on both One Life to Live and General Hospital. To us, he seemed to have it all. He was handsome, famous, adored. Yet he died by suicide on May 28, 2004, at just 52 years old.
That Anthony would bring about his own death is all the more shocking to us outsiders when we reflect on the vibrant life that he brought to Marco. The character, you’ll recall, was only intended to be a short-term one. He was housewife hooker Karen Wolek’s pimp, a total scumbug. But man, his portrayer turbocharged that scumbag with enough energy to power a whole city’s worth of television sets.
In no time, One Life to Live realized that it had struck pay dirt and un-murdered Marco (RIP, Marco’s twin brother, Mario) in order to keep Anthony around to work opposite Judith Light. A few years after the MVP’s wild run on One Life to Live ended, General Hospital brought him — and his pot-stirring character — back to ABC, where he continued his streak of romancing the unlikeliest of women, from One Life to Live’s haughty Dorian Lord to General Hospital’s resident rich bitch, Tracy Quartermaine.
But don’t take our word for how riveting Anthony was in action. Join Soaps.com in a stroll down Memory Lane as we revisit just a few moments that highlight the much-missed performer’s enviable charisma. First up, a series of 1992 scenes from General Hospital in which Marco is just “plane” outplayed by Tracy.
In this heated exchange from One Life to Live in 1978, Marco tries — desperately but in vain — to defend himself against Karen’s protector, Erika Slezak’s formidable Viki Riley.
And finally, in this scene from 1979 (starting at 1:39), we get Anthony canoodling with Viki’s alternate personality, Niki Smith, in the kind of nightmare that should’ve driven her husband, Joe, to start popping NoDoz like they were Chiclets.
