Less than a month after making a special cameo on ABC’s General Hospital, Tristan Rogers, who portrayed the legacy character Robert Scorpio, passed away on Friday. He was seventy-nine.
“The news of Tristan Rogers’ death has devastated the entire General Hospital family,” said executive producer Frank Valentini in a statement. Port Charles won’t be the same without Tristan (or Robert Scorpio), who has enthralled our supporters for forty-five years.
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In his early twenties, Rogers, who was born in Melbourne, Australia, had his stage debut as a drummer in a rock band with several pals. When they failed, Rogers resorted to modeling and commercial work to supplement his income. Rogers made the decision to try acting once the band broke up. He worked as a DJ in addition to playing a variety of parts in Australia before relocating to Los Angeles in an attempt to make a name for himself in Hollywood. He claimed that although his accent initially threw off casting directors, he was able to secure a two-day part on General Hospital in 1980.
During the 2022 episode of State of Mind with Maurice Benard on YouTube, Rogers admitted to fellow General Hospital actor Maurice Benard, “I had no idea at the point how big the show was.”
I did not have a name. According to Rogers, I was brought in specifically to beat up the hero, Luke (played by Anthony Geary), and then vanish. Gloria Monty, the executive producer at the time, asked him if he wanted to stay on after his first day was halfway over. Since they didn’t have a character created for him, Monty requested him to simply show up in scenes for three weeks while being shady and ominous until they came up with a plot. He was subsequently given the moniker Robert Scorpio after it was agreed that he would portray CK8, a spy. For the remainder of Rogers’ life, even when he wasn’t on the cast, the character would be a mainstay in Port Charles.
Fans continued to love Scorpio’s intermittent romance with Emma Samms’ character, Holly Sutton. Additionally, Scorpio had multiple stories and a romance with Finola Hughes’s character, Anna Devane, another spy. Kimberly McCullough’s character, Robin, was the daughter of Scorpio and Devane. During her brief comeback to the program last fall, Samms disclosed that Scorpio was the father of her adult daughter, Sofia Mattson’s character Sasha Gilmore.
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In sequences filmed with an homage to Casablanca, Rogers and Samms departed the show together in November 2024. When Sasha brought her new kid to his house in France in July, he made a brief comeback to the show. Rogers was later found to have lung cancer.
The Bold and the Beautiful, The Young & the Restless, and Studio City, for which Rogers received a Daytime Emmy Award for outstanding supporting actor in a digital drama series, are among his other acting accolades. His wife, Teresa Parkerson, a son, and a daughter survive him.
