Denise Alexander, Dr. Lesley Webber on ‘General Hospital,’ Dies at 85

Denise Alexander, who performed in thousands of radio episodes and on The Twilight Zone as a youngster before starring in two long stints as Dr. Lesley Webber on General Hospital, has died. She was 85.

Alexander died March 5 of natural causes at the home of a nephew in Boulder, Colorado, her stepson, Anthony Colla, told The Hollywood Reporter.

The daughter of a talent agent, Alexander had spent more than six years playing Susan Hunter Martin on NBC’s Days of Our Lives — she began in 1966 while in college — when G.H. producers at ABC heard that her contract had lapsed and began an “offer you can’t refuse situation,” she recalled in a 2010 interview for the website I Love Soaps.

She moved to Port Charles as Dr. Lesley Williams in March 1973, and over the next 11 years, her tough yet compassionate character would twice marry Dr. Rick Webber (Michael Gregory and then Chris Robinson) and discover that her daughter, Laura (Genie Francis), who she thought had died as a child, was alive.

Amid a contract disagreement, Lesley was killed in an offscreen automobile accident in March 1984, and Alexander told Good Morning America host David Hartman that she was sorry to see her go.

“When you work that closely with a character for 12 years, she’s become my closest companion, and I like her,” she said. “She is a lot of things I’m not, like neat and organized and always cheerful … well, not always.”

In August 1986, she returned to the soap world to play Bay City matriarch Mary McKinnon on NBC’s Another World through 1989, then came back to G.H. as a regular from 1996 through 2009. (It turns out Lesley had not been killed; she had been drugged and kept in a catatonic state by the same guy who had kidnapped her daughter!)

In her second G.H. stretch, Lesley had to deal with Laura’s own bout with catatonia and the fact that her daughter would kill Rick with a blow to the head in the Webber attic. Of course, things were not what they seemed.

“She broke barriers onscreen and off- portraying Dr. Lesley Webber — one of the first female doctors on daytime television — for nearly five decades,” General Hospital executive producer Frank Valentini noted in a statement. “It meant so much to have her reprise her role in recent years, and I am honored to have had the opportunity to work with her.”

Denise Lois Alexander was born in New York on Nov. 11, 1939, and raised on Long Island. Her father, Alec, was an agent whose clients included Frank Gorshin and Sal Mineo.

Starting at age 6, Alexander acted in more than 2,500 radio shows in New York. That included playing the daughter of a magician on The Big Guy in 1950 and the daughter of sophisticated parents (Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy) on 1953-54’s The Marriage, also for NBC.

“You would get out of school and go from one show to the next,” she recalled. “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.”

Alexander had made her onscreen debut on an episode of Perry Como’s Kraft Music Hall in 1949. She then acted on such anthology dramas as Armstrong Circle Theatre, The Philco Television Playhouse and Robert Montgomery Presents and had a regular gig on the sci-fi serial Tom Corbett, Space Cadet from 1951-55.

She appeared on Broadway in 1952-53 in a revival of Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour, starring Kim Hunter and Patricia Neal, then portrayed Mineo’s sister in the Don Siegel-directed Crime in the Streets (1956), also starring John Cassavetes.

She kept at it with appearances on Climax!, Father Knows Best, The Life of Riley, The Danny Thomas Show, The Detectives and The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, and in 1960 she played the daughter of a military scientist (Fritz Weaver) on the 14th episode of CBS’ The Twilight Zone, the lauded “Third From the Sun.”

Also in 1960, she began a two-year run as the daughter of an astronaut living in Cape Canaveral on the 1960-62 CBS soap The Clear Horizon and was up for the part of Maria in the film adaptation of West Side Story.

While studying to complete her bachelor’s degree in English at UCLA, Alexander accepted the part of Susan on Days of Our Lives.

“She started out as the bad girl and was thrown out of boarding school for smoking and drinking just as her mother [played by Coleen Gray] was starting a romance with Mickey Horton [John Clarke],” she recalled. “Suddenly she had this problem teenager on her hands. The character caught on and sparked something with the audience.”

Susan wound up losing her young son in a fatal swing-set accident and killing her husband, David (Clive Clerk), but then Alexander’s storylines got tamer, she said.

“At one point I remember getting a petition and went around the studio with this piece of paper for all the actors and the crew to sign that said, ‘Whereas the show would be much more interesting if the character of Susan Martin got into a romantic relationship,’” she recalled.

“I never got the part where you got to neck and make out with the guys. I started out as the bad girl but wound up as a good girl. Her big activity was baking at one point.” (When she bolted for G.H., Bennye Gatteys replaced her.)

With G.H. in 1976, Alexander received a Daytime Emmy nomination for outstanding actress in a drama series, and the show reached No. 1 in the daytime ratings soon after Robinson came aboard in 1978. “When it was Chris and me, Rick and Lesley were the Luke and Laura of their day,” she said.

Six years later, when she said she wanted to stick around but work less, G.H. killed off Lesley, and fans picketed ABC in protest.

As McKinnon, she was married to Vince McKinnon (Duke Stroud and then Robert Hogan) and battled amnesia before leaving to live with her kids in Minnesota. Despite a big salary, Alexander said the commute from Los Angeles to New York eventually got to her.

She would stop by G.H. for the first of several times in 2013 and work on the web shows Pretty the Series and The Inn.

Alexander was married to actor-director Richard A. Colla — he played Tony Merritt on Days of Our Lives — from the 1980s until his death on Christmas Eve 2021. She never had any children. Her stepdaughter, Elizabeth, died March 31.

In her 2010 interview, Alexander looked back on the heady days of being a soap opera star.

“The audience would surround your car and scream when you would try to drive away from some appearance,” she said. “Financially, it was great. And I didn’t have to go out on audition and be told I was too young, too old, too short, too fat, too boring, nothing. It was a great place to be and a great job and a great gift for an actor. And everybody got famous and that was fun.”