Little Known Facts About 5 Favorite General Hospital Stars

We watch our favorite General Hospital actors every weekday, but some fans don't know very much (if anything) about their offscreen interests and pursuits. Here are some little known facts about five of our favorite GH stars.

Kin Shriner

Did you know that before Kin Shriner pursued an acting career, he was a door-to-door salesman for the Fuller Brush company?

Fuller Brush, a family-owned business since 1906, sells a variety of household cleaning and personal care products. With the invention of computers and the internet, life is vastly different now for prospective customers, and we can simply purchase products on the Fuller Brush website. But decades ago, salesmen used to go door-to-door to sell their products.

Can we picture legal eagle Scotty Baldwin as a door-to-door salesman? Probably not. But if Shriner's personality is anything like Scotty's, then we're sure he must have racked up quite a few sales!

Rebecca Herbst

When Rebecca Herbst was a child, she was a competitive figure skater until she decided to pursue acting at age sixteen.

In addition to her athletic talents, she has a knack for designing clothes. She designed many of the dresses she wore to the Daytime Emmy Awards ceremonies. She also designed dresses for two GH co-stars -- Kimberly McCullough (who played Robin Scorpio-Drake) and Natalia Livingston (the second actress who played Emily Quartermaine) for the 33rd Daytime Emmy Awards ceremony.

Herbst is a major supporter of The Smile Train, an international charity that provides free cleft lip and palate surgeries for children in developing countries. She donates her fan event proceeds to this charity. She has a big heart!

Carolyn Hennesy

It's been a while since we've seen Diane on GH, but her portrayer, Carolyn Hennesy, is a busy lady. Did you know that she is a trapeze artist and even has a trapeze swing in her driveway?

In addition to acting, Hennesy is a children's book author. She wrote seven children's books that center on a character named Pandora. In 2011, she wrote the novel The Secret Life of Damian Spinelli, which features characters from GH. The novel reached number sixteen on The New York Times Best Seller list.

As if all of that weren't awesome enough, Hennesy also works tirelessly to help improve the lives of animals by promoting accredited zoos, aquariums, and marine parks such as SeaWorld. She has loved animals all of her life and has owned both rescue dogs and rescue cats. We love you, Carolyn! Animal lovers are special people.

Lynn Herring

Like Hennesy, Lynn Herring is also a big-time animal lover who shares her home with an assortment of pets that includes dogs, cats, horses, and what she calls the "Cluck Family" (a group of chickens). She and her late husband, Wayne Northrop (Roman Brady from Days of Our Lives), ran a cattle ranch together.

In 1977, Herring was Miss Virginia in the Miss USA pageant and was awarded the title of fourth runner-up. She later graduated from Louisiana State University with a bachelor's degree in psychology, hoping to become a counselor. But once she was bitten by the acting bug, she changed her mind. "Lucy turns out to be more fun," she said.

Maurice Benard

Maurice Benard is another huge animal lover on this list. He and his wife, Paula, have dozens of pets, including cats, snakes, birds, exotic fish, and a bulldog named Vito. Earlier in Benard's life, he had another bulldog named Corleone. We love all the references to The Godfather!

GH fans who follow Benard on Instagram likely know that he also has a goat named Buddy who is featured in some of his posts.

We love that we get to see Benard channel his love for animals through his Sonny character on GH, as Sonny recently adopted the adorable Pomeranian that he named Fizz. Speaking of Fizz, we haven't seen him in a while, or Outback either, for that matter. Let's see those two cuties again. We miss them!

Catch all-new episodes of General Hospital weekdays on ABC and streaming on Hulu.