General Hospital’s Nancy Lee Grahn Confesses, ‘I Was Falling Madly in Love’ With On-Screen Leading Man

It wasn’t just Santa Barbara viewers who were swept away by the romance of Nancy Lee Grahn’s Julia Wainwright and Lane Davies’ Mason Capwell in the 1980s. Turns out, the Emmy winner herself got caught up in it, too — more than was advisable.

“I was falling madly — and I stress madly — in love with Lane,” she admits to Soap Opera Digest. “I walked right into the danger-zone trap of intensely working 18 hours a day for years with a brilliantly and vividly written love story [for the characters] and not being able to decipher fantasy from what was real.

“Had I known myself better at the time, I might have dodged pitfalls,” she adds, “but I didn’t and instead grew from them.”

The way they were…

Following Davies’ departure from the much-missed NBC soap in 1989, Grahn was paired with one new Mason (Dynasty vet Gordon Thomson) after another (Young & Restless’ original Jack Abbott, Terry Lester). Half a dozen years after General Hospital cast her as the very Julia-like Alexis Wainwright, Davies passed through Port Charles himself as Zander Smith’s dad, Cameron Lewis.

Alas, lightning didn’t strike twice — it is notoriously as tricky to catch on screen as it is in a bottle — and the character for whom Liz’s son Cameron is named was killed off in 2004.