It was fortunate that widescreen TVs were becoming more widespread in the 1990s, because there was no way Maurice Benard’s charisma could have been contained by a small screen. When the future Emmy winner made his General Hospital debut on August 13, 1993, he brought all of the charm that had made him known during his time as Nico Kelly on All My Children — and then some.
Mind you, as captivating as Benard was, Sonny Corinthos was certainly no altar boy. In his first scenes, the future Port Charles godfather approached high-school girl Karen Wexler and immediately launched into the sweet talk, hoping to get her onstage at his strip club, the Paradise Lounge. When she insisted that she would be too self-conscious, he actually went so far as to deliver a girl-power pep talk to persuade her to take her clothes off. “You don’t look like the self-conscious type,” he said, flashing those now-legendary dimples. “You look sure of yourself, like you don’t do anything you don’t want to.”
A pretty girl like Karen — or Carrie, as Scotty Baldwin’s daughter was calling herself — must enjoy dancing, right? And “stripping is dancing,” Sonny said. “It’s a form of self-expression.”
Mm-hmm — for the male audience’s gratification. But the junior mobster left that part unsaid. Instead, he challenged the conclusions Karen was making about strippers, comparing her judgment to “making a generalization about someone because of the way they wear their hair.”
Sonny was as smooth and opportunistic as they came. And he knew exactly which buttons to push, assuring Karen that the regular dancers were allowed to rehearse at the club when it was closed. And sure, every now and then, someone would bomb. But others… aw, man! “When their eyes adjust to the lights and they hear the roar of approval from the crowd,” he teased, “they know they’re on.”
You can watch a baby-faced Benard in action in the video above — and marvel at just how far he has come in the role. Think about it: He took Sonny from being a spoiler in Karen’s romance with Jagger Cates to becoming half of two of soapdom’s all-time greatest supercouples (Sonny and Brenda, and Sonny and Carly) to the show’s central character, to whom virtually every other Port Charles denizen is connected.
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