Who the Hell is Alexis Davis?

On any list of the best actresses in soap opera history, Nancy Lee Grahn would certainly place near the top. Too unconventional to play the damsel in perpetual distress, and too intelligent to play the sweeps-week victim, Grahn confounds expectations of feminine soap acting with her complex and confident performances. She has never acted with a man who is her equal. I’ll repeat that for the righteously indignant: She has never acted with a man who is her equal.

Yes, I love Lane Davies too, especially in his turn as Mason Capwell, Grahn’s sparring partner when she played the incomparable Julia Wainwright on Santa Barbara. And Rick Hearst, current paramour to her Alexis Davis on General Hospital, is competent and interesting. (And then there was Maurice. That’s a separate post someday.)

As Julia, Grahn played a fiercely independent feminist and attorney who refused to succumb to male authority and sought happiness in her own (Wainw)right. She constantly questioned her own happiness, especially when that feeling was linked to Mason, because of her deep distrust of his gender. Their comically tortured romance was, I believe, what made that show special and unique, and yet it was Grahn’s Julia alone who stood out and subverted the genre’s traditions by dominating the perspective of every scene. (The contrast on SB between Grahn’s Julia and Marcy Walker’s Eden was startling, and indicative of the show’s schizophrenic writing. Julia seemed to come out of a 1920’s play or a 70’s Jane Fonda movie; Eden was a straight-up Days of Our Lives heroine who needed a “Save Me” tee-shirt.)

Santa Barbara left us in 1993, and three years later Grahn returned to daytime as Alexis Davis on General Hospital. Alexis is (shocker!) an attorney, and as soon as she appeared she started raising hell – with her cousin, the brooding patriarch of an evil family, Stefan Cassadine, and with Stefan’s arch-nemesis, then-lion-haired Luke Spencer.

From the start, it was clear that GH’s writers intended Alexis to be a Julia clone. Despite her ties to the show’s gothic underpinnings, Alexis was thrust into a relationship with Masonesque Ned Ashton, another millionaire playboy with serious women issues. This pairing evolved into Alexis’s loveless marriage to Jasper Jacks (or, as the character and the writers so ridiculously insist, Jax) while Jax’s too-skinny love married Ned in a Bob-Carol-Ted-Alice pastiche.

Eventually, Alexis fell victim to the incomprehensible revisionism forced on the Cassadine family tree, and she was revealed to be Stefan’s sister, not his cousin, for reasons that had an effect on absolutely no one. (If it had turned out they weren’t related, that might have explained that weird vibe we always got when Lex visited Stef in that crypt of a mansion, and then we would have had a soap opera story.) In a similar vein, history was altered so that Stefan’s revelation that he was Nikolas Cassadine’s parent (with Laura Spencer), not his uncle as previously believed, was undone, and he returned to being an uncle who was written into irrelevance. Apparently, it is a recurring theme that Cassadines have no idea who created them and, in turn, whom they created.

Alexis’s involvement in this Cassadine soup did her no good, and she spent her time representing characters played by less interesting actors in three-week trials until her big hookup with mobster Sonny Corinthos (which produced a daughter) and then Sonny’s brother Ric (which produced another daughter). Even Lane Davies turned up again in an ill-conceived role and was quickly bumped off. In the midst of all this, it was revealed, even more improbably, that Alexis had a secret daughter portrayed, or rather represented in a physical space, by Playboy playmate and Dancing With the Stars winner Kelly Monaco. It would be difficult to find two actresses less alike in a common story, unless perhaps Judi Dench and Paris Hilton were to make a comedy about hashish-smoking nuns. Saddling a fiercely independent woman with this doe-eyed weeper seems to be one of GH's most criminal acts.

It’s likely that any soap opera character’s history, when quantified and calcified in this manner, would represent this many shifts in tone and detail, given that producers and writers change over time and have different visions for the characters. But it has seemed evident that, in the ten (ten! astonishing!) years that Grahn has been on GH, she has been forced to extremes in order to cobble some sort of consistent individual out of Alexis Davis. Is she Julia Wainwright-lite? Is she the voice of reason in a nefarious, incestuous family? Is she a woman who loves a mobster or the woman who wants him put in jail? Is she a woman who keeps secrets like a daughter born years ago, or a woman who is wounded when those she loves keep secrets from her? The writers don’t seem to know (or, perhaps, care), and yet Nancy Lee Grahn, day in and day out, keeps us interested. With her wry smile, flashing eyes, and strident stance, she makes us wonder.

I don’t know any more about Alexis Davis than I did when I first saw her ten years ago. But it will be easy to keep watching her, and maybe one day I’ll know what makes her tick.