Additive perturbation results for the generalized Drazin inverse of Banach space operators are presented. Precisely, if Ad denotes the generalized Drazin inverse of a bounded linear operator A on an arbitrary complex Banach space, then in some special cases (A + B)d is computed in terms of Ad and Bd. Thus, recent results of Hartwig, Wang and Wei (Linear Algebra Appl. 322 (2001), 207–217) are extended to infinite dimensional settings with simplified proofs.