Luke and Laura’s General Hospital Wedding Marks 40 Year Anniversary

It was a wedding that General Hospital fans had been waiting for, for what felt like forever. Lucas Lorenzo Spencer was marrying Laura Webber Baldwin at the Mayor’s mansion, with everyone in attendance — including super fan and film legend Elizabeth Taylor as Helena Cassadine. It took place on November 16 and 17 — 40 years ago.

General Hospital Sets Ratings Record

College students cut class to make sure they didn’t miss a second of this incredible event, which helped ratings soar to a height that no daytime soap would ever match again — an estimated 30 million viewers. As with any huge soap opera wedding, it was about the romance of the couple who people had been rooting for against all odds and, like any good soap, there needed to be some drama.

As Kin Shriner (Scott Baldwin) noted on Twitter, “40 years ago today Scotty disrupted a big wedding @GeneralHospital chaos ensued!” Scotty, as he was called then, had loved and married Laura (Genie Francis) first, but she left him for Luke (Anthony Geary).

The two pretty much invented the soap trope of love on the run as they fought back against Frank Smith’s mob, looking for the secret of the Left-Handed Boy so they could decode Smith’s little black book — all while hiding out in Beechers Corners.

After taking down the mob, they had to save the world from Mikkos Cassadine, who wanted to buck the whole global warming trend and instead freeze it. But together with a newly arrived WSB agent, Robert Scorpio, they managed to save Port Charles. Unfortunately, they made an enemy in Mikkos’s wife, Helena — and she put a curse on them at their wedding.

While hindsight has certainly put the early days of this couple — the fact that Luke raped Laura on the disco floor — into a more disturbing light, which the show did deal with, it doesn’t change the fact that these two characters (and actors) changed the face of daytime as they captured the imagination of millions of viewers, capping off that love with an incredible wedding of the century.

For the behind-the-scenes story about how this wedding came to happen in the first place, check out this story Soap Hub ran last year. It’s chock-full of tidbits, including how Elizabeth Taylor was a big reason why it happened.

General Hospital (GH) airs weekdays on ABC. Check your local listings for airtimes. For more about what’s coming up in Port Charles, check out all the latest that’s been posted on GH spoilers, and for an in-depth look at the show’s history, click here.