James Patrick Stuart Returns As GH’s Valentin!

If Looks Could Kill: On GH’s Friday cliffhanger, Valentin peered in on Charlotte’s reunion with her mother, Lulu.

James Patrick Stuart, whose General Hospital alter ego, Valentin Cassadine, was last seen on July 17, 2024, made his return to the canvas in the dramatic cliffhanger of the December 27 episode of the show.

Comeback Trail

In the storyline, Valentin hightailed it out of Port Charles alongside his daughter, Charlotte Cassadine, after Anna Devane (Valentin’s ex-lover) urged him to leave town in order to avoid taking the fall for the criminal activities of Pikeman, the illegal arms-dealing enterprise that he was heading up.

Valentin’s departure was particularly upsetting to Laura Collins, Charlotte’s grandmother, who searched for Charlotte to no avail.

However, when Charlotte’s mother, Lulu Spencer, emerged from her four-year coma, she almost immediately set her sights on tracking down her missing child.

Lulu and Charlotte made contact by phone earlier this week, and Lulu quickly slipped away to Prague, where she was joyfully reunited with her daughter.

In the final moments of the episode, though, Charlotte and Lulu’s emotional catch-up was interrupted when Charlotte caught a glimpse of her father peering at her and her mother through a window.

After a memorable, Daytime Emmy-nominated run on All My Children as the villainous Will Cortlandt and a prolific career in prime-time, Stuart made his GH debut as Valentin on July 11, 2016.

The role was originally intended to be short-term, but the actor made such a positive impression on the show’s higher-ups that Valentin was written into long-term story, with Stuart earning Daytime Emmy nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actor in 2020, 2021 and 2022.

Stuart’s appearances on GH became more sporadic when, in 2022, he was cast to play a lead role on the Disney Channel series The Villains of Valley View.

In an interview with Soap Opera Digest, Stuart noted that it was always his hope to balance both projects, and when The Villains of Valley View was first picked up to go to series, “I took Frank [Valentini, executive producer] out to dinner and I told him, ‘I hope you realize that my heart is here.

I love the work we do together, I love this family.’ [And] he said, ‘Well, we’ll make it work.’ ” In October, the show was canceled by Disney after a two-season run.

Originally, the character of Valentin was believed to be Mikkos Cassadine’s illegitimate son, but in time, it was revealed that he was the son of Victor Cassadine (Mikkos’s brother) and Helena Cassadine.

The same year Stuart joined the show, the Charlotte character was introduced, and it came to light that she was the biological daughter of Valentin and Lulu via artificial insemination, courtesy of Helena’s machinations.

This came as quite a shock to Lulu, who in time developed a close bond with the little girl she had not previously known existed.

Over his years in Port Charles, Valentin was romantically linked to Nina Reeves and to Anna, with the latter pairing especially popular with fans. Although Valentin is in Prague and Anna is back in Port Charles, might Stuart’s return lead to another chapter in the “Vanna” saga? After all, Stuart once referenced Prague as the setting for what he envisioned to be an ideal Valentine’s Day date for the adventurous duo.

“They would probably end up somewhere where a foreign language would be spoken fluently by both of them. Perhaps Prague at the opera,” he mused to Digest in 2023. “And there would have to be danger involved — there would have to be some life-threatening moment for them to both get aroused sufficiently!”