Surprisingly, there’s nothing an actor likes better than making a spectacle of himself. Hence Ted Danson in blackface, Demi Moore doing a second Vanity Fair nude cover, Elizabeth Taylor hawking perfume.
Now it’s Genie Francis making fun of her image as one of daytime TV’s most beloved personalities. She stars with the late Raymond Burr in “Perry Mason: The Case of the Killer Kiss” (8 p.m. Sunday, NBC-Ch. 5), playing a soap opera queen accused of murder.
“It was a wonderful opportunity to spoof myself,” says Francis, whose warm, open personality is equally evident when she’s chatting in her dressing room and when she’s on camera playing Laura Spencer on “General Hospital” (1976-81, 1983-84, 1993-?).
“Who better than me to spoof me? In the `Perry Mason’ movie, I wear big bouffanty soap opera hair and my character overacts terribly. The first 20 pages of the script are filled with wonderful silliness. Then the murder occurs on the set, and I have to start playing straight and go with the vulnerability. I’m framed for the murder, and Perry Mason defends me because I used to be his ward after my parents died.”
Working with Burr in his last dramatic appearance before his death from liver cancer on Sept. 12, Francis learned another enduring truth about actors: They want to die in harness. “Raymond was very sick while we were making the movie. There was a lot of stress on the set because everybody knew he was going to die.
“He was a wonderful man, and he taught me such a lesson in dignity. The man never complained once, even though he was in pain constantly. He kept his sense of humor, always ad-libbing little funny asides at the ends of scenes. Some of those lines that cracked the crew up stayed in the movie.
“Some days he was too sick to continue. He’d do the master (the wide-angle shot that establishes the location and all the actors in the scene) and then he’d have to excuse himself (before the closeups could be shot). That happened our first day working together. He said: `I’m sorry, I’m going to have to leave. I wish I had more time. I’ll be back on Tuesday. Then we’ll do some real acting together.’
“It’s wonderful to be able to work right up to the end. There’s not another actor in the world who wouldn’t say that’s how he wants to go.”
It would take a soap star to see the inspirational aspect of Burr’s last job. As a group, soap opera actors are more like troupers than actors who work for nighttime TV or in movies, who tend to be more obsessed with their place in the pecking order. Established soap performers think long term. Like theater, soap work is hard work.
Francis says of “General Hospital,” “It’s a TV factory, that’s what it is.”
Right after she made the Perry Mason movie, Francis re-entered the soap factory at ABC’s Los Angeles studio at Prospect and Vermont, where “General Hospital” is the major profit center.
Our story picks up when the charming blond actress, 31, finds herself at loose ends in New York City, where she had gone three years before to re-energize her career. Once daytime TV’s biggest attraction, the still-young star is unhappy apart from her husband, Jonathan Frakes, who is hard at work in Los Angeles as one of the stars of “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”
“Shockingly, I chose my personal life over my career,” Francis says of her decision to abandon her attempt to break into theater in New York and return to Hollywood. “Did I want to stay there by myself for another year or two or did I want to be with my husband? My choice surprised even me.
“The first year we were apart, phoning each other four times a day, it was very romantic. The second year it was tiring. The third year it was torture, and I couldn’t handle it anymore.”
So Francis sublet her New York apartment and said goodbye to the snow and the street people and the snubs at auditions.
“Luckily, I have a blessed life,” she says. “I could come home to a job where I’m welcomed with open arms and live at last in the same house as my husband instead of having to take an airplane to see him. This is going to be a fun year.”
In addition to “Perry Mason” and “General Hospital,” Francis will appear in the third massive installment of the John Jakes Civil War saga, “North and South.” In this six-hour mini-series, airing next year and subtitled “Heaven and Hell,” she again appears as Southern belle Brett Main. Brett is reunited briefly with the Hazzard family “after a terrible tragedy,” she says.
Francis naturally lapses into soapese to describe “North and South,” now that she’s back in the “General Hospital” factory. She has a year’s contract and is grateful that ABC went all-out to trumpet “the return of Luke and Laura.” The network even splurged on a location shoot in sunny Buffalo, for scenes showing the golden pair on the run from the Mafia.
“I love the fan attention,” Francis says. “This time I don’t expect the mania, more `Gee, it’s nice to see old friends again.’ I wouldn’t want the hair-pulling hysteria again.”
She remembers one frightening moment 12 years ago at the height of the Luke-and-Laura hype. “We were doing a personal appearance in Atlantic City. People were crying and throwing themselves onto the limo.
“I saw a woman convulsing a few feet away from the car. I pushed out of the car and went up to her. The network people were screaming, `Get Genie back in here!’ I ran up to the convulsing woman and hugged her to calm her down.
“She didn’t respond. She stayed in her mania. I realized it wasn’t me. It had nothing to do with me.”
Another lesson about acting, to go with “spoof yourself whenever you can” and “die in costume”: “It’s only a job.”
