Deidre Hall says Drake Hogestyn kept working on Days of Our Lives after his pancreatic cancer diagnosis until he could not continue. That account turns his final stretch on the show into a rare on-the-record look at how production handled a longtime actor through serious illness.
Hall said Hogestyn died in September 2024 at age 70, and that he and she had worked together on Days of Our Lives for nearly four decades. She added that his family later said he passed on Sept. 28, 2024, surrounded by loved ones.
Ken Corday and the final choice
Hall said Hogestyn talked to Ken Corday after his cancer diagnosis and wanted to keep working. “Ken said, ‘I will do anything. What do you want?’ And Drake wanted to keep working, and so he said, ‘Then that’s what you’ll do,’” Hall said. For a show built on long-running continuity, that meant keeping a core performer in the frame instead of cutting him loose early.
Hall said the production adapted around him with wardrobe choices that masked the visible effects of illness. “And they put him in turtlenecks and bulky sweaters and anything to kind of help him look fine, and he worked right up until he couldn’t.” That is the operational detail here: the show did not just accommodate a request, it built a practical workaround to keep him on camera.
Hall, Hogestyn, and Marlena Evans
Hall said, “He kind of took care of everybody,” and described him as a team player who was “wonderfully prepared.” Her memory lands with extra weight because their characters, Marlena Evans and John Black, became one of the show’s most beloved pairings after they got together in 1986. Nearly four decades later, that pairing still anchors the public memory of both actors.
Hall also said Hogestyn never discussed his diagnosis on set. “Obviously, we had the warning,” she said. “It was not announced, it was not made public, but we know him — we’re looking at him, we’re watching him, I’m hugging him.” That contradiction sits at the center of the story: the illness was private in conversation, but visible enough that the people around him could read it in real time.
September 2024 after the loss
His death in September 2024 drew a statement from his family through the show’s official account, saying he faced pancreatic cancer with “incredible strength and determination” and died peacefully. The show later used his character’s death in a storyline eight months after his own, leaving Hall’s account as the clearest public explanation yet of how his final working period actually unfolded.
Hall recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of joining Days of Our Lives, and that makes her recollection more than a memorial anecdote. It reads like the record of a workplace making room for a colleague who wanted to stay on the job, and the main unanswered point is the length of that final run: how long after his diagnosis he kept filming is still the piece that matters most to anyone tracing the end of his time on the show.
