INSTAGRAM/General Hospital
On Thursday, July 19 at 6 p.m. ET/3 p.m. PT, Lane Davies and Nancy Lee Grahn will be chatting live with Michael Fairman on his YouTube channel.
The actors recently shared scenes on General Hospital, where Grahn has played Alexis Davis since 1996, with Davies taking on the role of Fergus Byrne (after a 2002-04 stint on the show as Cameron Lewis). But their professional association goes back several decades to Santa Barbara, where they were one of the show’s most popular supercouples as Mason Capwell and Julia Wainwright Capwell.
Davies was an original cast member of SB, which ran on NBC from 1984-93, and made a big impact on fans as the erudite and troubled attorney Mason. It was in 1986 that Grahn joined the SB ranks as Julia, the brilliant and neurotic lawyer who stole Mason’s heart. The pair overlapped on the show through 1989, when Davies exited, though the Mason/Julia love story continued on with two different recasts, Terry Lester and Gordon Thomson.
The actors’ real-life relationship was sometimes as tempestuous as the one they were playing out on screen. In 2023, Grahn confesssed to Soap Opera Digest that early in her SB career, “I was falling madly, and I stress madly, in love with Lane. 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 [that of Mason and Julia] and not being able to decipher fantasy from what was real. Had I known myself better at the time, I might’ve dodged pitfalls, but I didn’t and instead grew from them.”
By the time they began working together again on GH in 2002, that was ancient history to both of them. Davies noted to Digest in 2015 ,”“We had both grown up and gotten our egos out of the way.” Their more recent reunion was even more delightful. Davies told Digest earlier this year, “Nancy and I, we buried our hatchet years ago [after clashing on set at SB]. But even when we were wielding hatchets, she was still fun to work with! The audience still liked it, hatchet in hand or not! So, coming back all these years later, when we both, dare I say, mellowed with age, it was just extremely rewarding. It’s always rewarding to work with good actors. But when it’s somebody you have a deep history with, in terms of a working relationship and even a romantic relationship, it just gives you more layers to play with, and that’s always fun.”
In their conversation with Fairman, expect the stars to share juicy backstage stories from both SB and GH, as well as discuss SB’s imminent, star-studded 40th anniversary reunion, which is set to take place on August 2 in Burbank, CA.
To participate in the livestream interview, click here.
