Hallmark yule special stars Genie Francis

LOS ANGELES - A little more than 20 years ago actress Genie Francis was gracing the cover of every magazine and tabloid as the distaff half of the fabled Luke-and- Laura romance on

General Hospital

.

Thirty million viewers tuned in to watch their wedding - more than any before or since.

But the bride did not live happily ever after. Francis was already snagged in a web of self-destruction when she was told that the show's producer considered her a mere appendage to her costar.

"It happened in one moment. . . . I left the show, bam! I was done," says Francis, curled up on a green silk couch in a hotel room here.

The people who were printing those 72-point headlines hadn't a clue about the truth.

Francis, painfully timid as a kid, had started on the soap when she was 14. "I was very shy in school and having trouble getting on with the other kids, and I elected to be a hall monitor so I could eat lunch alone. I went from hall monitor to star and never really had the opportunity to work that out," Francis says.

She was only 17 when she began using cocaine. "All the fanfare was going on and I was so separated from my peer group. I was in studio school, so I was all alone, growing up too fast, other guys and people on the show were much older than me," she recalls.

"Hollywood was very into drugs and alcohol. Cocaine was the thing. Everybody was doing it, and needing to fit in somewhere, and fitting in with those people who were doing the drugs is what I chose to do - which was a bad choice." After several missteps she kicked the habit seven years later.

Francis has started anew several times in her life. That helps her understand the character she plays in the Hallmark Channel's Christmas special

The Note

, premiering Dec. 8. Francis plays a journalist whose career is in jeopardy when she discovers a note written by an airline passenger during the last moments of his life. Her quest to find the person the note was meant for changes her life.

Happily married for nearly 20 years to actor-director Jonathan Frakes (

Star Trek: The Next Generation

), Francis has two children, a boy, 13, and a girl, 10.

She met Frakes when they made the mini-series

Bare Essence

. "I liked him right away because he always teased me and I felt comfort- able with him. He didn't ever put me up on a pedestal," she says with a grin.

"We did a few shows together, and then the last show we did together was

North and South

, and we were on location for over a year and several people got married, and some still are. Girls were in their early 20s, boys in their early 30s, and everybody was looking to partner up."

Francis returned to

General Hospital

when she was 31, leaving again 10 years later when the show reneged on a promise to give her summers off.

"That was when I turned 40 and my husband got offered to do this movie in London and he said, 'If you're not going to work anymore on that show do you want me to take this job in London?' I said, 'Yeah, let's go.' So we went off and had this great adventure in London for three years. . . . The kids went to the London schools. We saw all of Europe. And we just had a great time," she says.

"Then coming away from London we stopped in Maine first and had this moment: 'Do we go back to L.A.?' And we just thought, 'Why are we rushing back? There's this beautiful life we have on the bay in Maine, this wholesome place.' "

Now Francis, 55, works when she wants. But she still battles her timidity. "I wish I could be gregarious and comfortable like my husband. That's probably a big part of why I chose him. He has that, and I was surprised he chose me because I was the wallflower of all those women in

North and South

." Laughing, she adds, "I was surprised that he - Mambo King - wanted me."