Big Sad😭News !! General Hospital Leslie Charleson !! Very Heartbreaking 😭 News !! It Will Shock You.

Hello everyone,

In tribute to Leslie Charleston on the anniversary of her debut as Monica, however bad your first day at a new job was, Leslie Charleston’s was worse. Not only was hers the day that Elvis Presley died, and the then General Hospital newcomer was a huge fan, but the makeup and wardrobe department were on strike. Plus, the veteran of A Flame in the Wind, As the World Turns, and Love Is a Many Splendored Thing was taking over as Dr. Monica Weber from Patty Ron, who had been rather rudely fired.

She said during a 2022 episode of State of Mind, which you can watch in full below: “So nobody liked me. I came into a kind of hostile environment.”

Though Charleston was ready to rise to the challenge, boy, was the deck stacked against her. In addition to the cast giving her mostly the cold shoulder, the producer who hired her was fired and replaced by Gloria Monty. The show had 3 weeks to demonstrate some signs of life in the ratings, or ABC was going to pull the plug.

“I was saying hello and goodbye to people in the same breath,” the actress told Soap Opera Digest in 1981. “It was very difficult.”

But after Monty implemented her sweeping changes, General Hospital didn’t just bounce back — it skyrocketed to the No. 1 spot in the ratings, thereby buying Charleston time to settle in and make the role of Monica not only her own but so much her own that now it’s hard to remember that anyone else played the part.

Not for nothing, but she’s the show’s longest-serving actor. As Charleston went from one front-burner storyline — Monica’s love triangle with the Weber brothers, Rick and Jeff — to another, her tumultuous marriage to Dr. Alan Quartermaine and battles with his family, she came to be embraced by both her colleagues and viewers as family.

In General Hospital: The Complete Scrapbook, she shared that she’d once been pulled away at an airport to meet a fan. “She knew me so well from watching the show, and she was convinced that I knew her too. Suddenly, she looked at me and said, ‘My God, I am so sorry, you don’t know me,’” Charleston continued. “She told me that because I was in her living room every day, she was convinced we knew each other.”