Jonathan Frakes and Genie Francis, Married Since 1988

Why he’s handing her the award this month

NATAS picked Francis as this year’s Lifetime Achievement honoree, and her husband will hand it to her at the 53rd Daytime Emmys on Friday, October 30, at the Hollywood Palladium.

It starts at 8 p.m. ET, which is 5 a.m. Saturday in Pakistan, and streams on the NATAS YouTube channel.

The timing works out nicely, since February 2027 is 50 years since her first episode. For another daytime-TV life, read our page on Ryan Paevey.

How they met on two sets, three years apart

They first crossed paths on Bare Essence, a short-lived NBC drama from 1983. Frakes later joked to People, “she was too young for me!”

She remembers it a little differently. “He treated me like one of the guys,” she told People years later, and she said she loved that.

North and South, 1985

Two years on, the same producer cast them both in ABC’s North and South, shot in Charleston and Natchez. Wikipedia credits co-star Kirstie Alley with nudging them together.

Their first date was in New Orleans over a Memorial Day break. Francis has said she turned down a weekend getaway and asked for something old-fashioned instead. “We went to a McDonald’s and sat in a church parking lot and talked,” she said. We love that.

Jonathan Frakes wife Genie Francis and her 50 years as Laura

She was 14 when she first played Laura on General Hospital, by her own account. By 1981, Laura’s wedding to Luke Spencer drew about 30 million viewers, still the most-watched single episode of a regularly scheduled daytime show.

Francis won the Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in 2007, and she’s also turned up on All My Children, Days of Our Lives and The Young and the Restless.

Frakes, born August 19, 1952, is ten years older. Star Trek fans know him as Commander Will Riker, and he’s become a busy TV director too.

Two careers, one calendar

Frakes got Will Riker on The Next Generation not long after North and South, and he came back to the role in the third season of Picard. Behind the camera he’s directed episodes of Roswell, Leverage and the Los Angeles spin-off of NCIS.

Roswell ties them together again, because Francis later had a role on it. That was one of several primetime jobs for her, along with Roseanne, Cybill and 3rd Rock from the Sun.

Her day job never really stopped. Soaps kept filming during the 2023 Hollywood strikes, and Frakes said he’d been running lines with her before a day with “probably 30 pages of dialogue”.

He’s followed her to Hallmark, too. She’d made several films for the network before he starred in A Biltmore Christmas in 2023.

Why we think it’s lasted

Nobody can see inside a marriage, and we won’t pretend to. There is a pattern in the record, though. They keep working together, from Bare Essence and North and South to a family Christmas album.

They picked small-town Maine for years, and almost four decades in, they still talk about each other warmly in interviews. Frakes’ own word for it is “fortunate”.

This Friday adds one more joint credit, a lifetime award handed over by the man she met on a nighttime soap.

Their children, Jameson and Eliza

They have two children, Jameson Ivor and Elizabeth Frances, who go by Jamo and Eliza. Both are grown.

Eliza acts and writes, Frakes told People. Neither of them has a big public profile, and we’ll leave it there.

He also joked that growing up with them might have given Eliza unrealistic ideas about Hollywood marriages. “It’s hard, I would think, to come into a family where two people have been as fortunate as Genie and I have been,” he said.

In 2009 the whole family made a Christmas album, with the kids on backup vocals and Frakes on trombone.

The Maine years

For years home was Belfast, Maine, a long way from Los Angeles. They ran a home-furnishings shop there called The Cherished Home.

It closed in August 2012 because Francis was too busy acting to keep it going. Frakes kept his Maine ties and has taught directing classes at Maine Media College.

They moved to Beverly Hills in 2008 and later settled in Calabasas. From what we can see, neither has let a big career pull the other away from home for long.

Marriage timeline

• 1983 Co-star on Bare Essence.
• 1985 Start dating while filming North and South.
• 1986 Frakes’ earlier marriage to Debralee Scott has ended.
• 1986 or 1987 Engagement. Sources differ on the year.
• May 28, 1988 Wedding day.
• 2008 Move from Belfast, Maine, to Beverly Hills, then Calabasas.
• Aug 2012 Close their Maine store, The Cherished Home.
• Oct 30, 2026 He presents her lifetime award.

One small wrinkle. Wikipedia says they got engaged in 1986, a year after they started dating, while People’s 1994 feature says Frakes proposed on his knees in 1987. We’ve listed both.

Checked facts and loose ends

More family stories

If long marriages interest you, try Karen Drew and Kathy Kinney, both built from on-the-record sources.

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