Denver actor and model Lucy Roucis, who continued to perform for 33 years after the early onset of Parkinson’s disease, was ferociously opinionated, proudly vainglorious and as quick with a shockingly dirty joke as her mouth would allow her to be at any given time.
And she was the backbone of Phamaly Theatre Company, appearing in a record 43 productions for the pioneering troupe that has existed for 31 years to create performance opportunities for people with disabilities.
She was not just a handful, frequent co-star Mark Dissette joked. “She was two handfuls and a foot.”
Despite living with the inexorably progressive disease that leads to shaking, stiffness and difficulty walking, Roucis could find something funny in just about anything. Maybe because of it. In fact, she developed an entire comedy routine on the pros and cons of Parkinson’s that landed her a cameo in the 2010 Ed Zwick film “Love & Other Drugs,” starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway.
One of her pros: “Never being asked to babysit.”
Con: “Being asked to hold a kid, and he ends up in a tree.”
Roucis was found in her Sheridan apartment on Monday, dead at the age of 61. According to the Michael J. Fox Foundation, that’s around the age when patients usually first begin to develop Parkinson’s symptoms. For Roucis, it started at age 25. Over the next 36 years, she became an outspoken advocate for Parkinson’s research and awareness, rubbing elbows with everyone from Michael J. Fox to Janet Reno to Muhammad Ali to Denver comedian Josh Blue.
“Lucy was just real,” said Regan Linton, Artistic Director of Denver’s Phamaly Theatre Company. ”She cut through the B.S. Whenever she thought something could be better artistically, she said so. She made Phamaly good.”
While Parkinson’s slowed Roucis’ line delivery as an actor, it never stopped her from delivering a slew of both comic and powerfully dramatic performances on stage and screen. The longer it took her to speak, it seemed, the more audiences hung on her every word. Roucis will be remembered as much for her charming performances as Adelaide in “Guys & Dolls” and Glinda in “The Wiz” as for her harrowing turns as Nurse Ratched in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and Mrs. Kendal in “The Elephant Man.”
Roucis twice won Westword Best of Denver awards and earned a Denver Post Ovation Award nomination as the 2010 Colorado Theatre Person of the Year.
“Phamaly is Lucy, and Lucy is Phamaly,” Linton said. “And when you lose somebody like that, a piece of Phamaly’s heart has been lost.”
Roucis was born August 22, 1959, and graduated from St. Mary’s High School and Loretto Heights College before immediately moving to California to pursue her dream of becoming a model and film actor.
Roucis was finding steady employment in Hollywood, appearing in a succession of truly awful films including John Cusack’s “Better Off Dead” (as the hooker in the mink bikini) and “The Party Animal” (as a flatulent Italian sophisticate). That was a 1983 “Porky’s” knockoff that producers billed as “the raunchiest film of the decade.” She also landed parts on “General Hospital,” “Santa Barbara,” the CBS pilot “Domestic Life” with Martin Mull, as well as several TV commercials and print ads.
It wasn’t Shakespeare, but it paid the rent.
“It was great,” Roucis said in a past interview. “Get this: I was living in a guest house on an estate. My girlfriend was having an affair with this Japanese mogul, and he liked me so much he gave me a house to live in. Now I know how that sounds, but I never ever slept with someone for any of this. I was just the friend of the girl who did.”
Roucis seemed to have all the time in the world in front of her in 1987 when she first noticed stomach pains that would last a year. It would be another seven years before Parkinson’s was determined to be the correct diagnosis. “I asked the doctor: ‘How bad is this going to get?’ “ Roucis said. “And he just said: ‘Bad.’ ” During that time, she was additionally diagnosed with thyroid cancer.
For years, Roucis’ routine included 26 pills and an average of five seizures a day, each lasting up to 30 minutes. “When I can’t move, it’s so hard to do anything,” Roucis said. “Your body is frozen. Your reactions are slower. You are imprisoned.”
Roucis’ disability took her career into activism, public relations, public speaking and lobbying through the Fox Foundation. She made national news in 2008 when she underwent pioneering Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) surgery that left her with two dime-sized holes drilled into her head, two electrodes attached to her brain and two pacemaker-like battery packs in her chest. She playfully called her new implants her “chesticles.”
But being an actor was always the core part of Roucis’ identity. And since 1993, Phamaly gave her the opportunity to keep that part of her identity thriving.
“Phamaly truly saved my life,” Roucis said, “because they decided to build a company that would allow people with disabilities to work in a professional setting, to get paid to act, and have their disability be OK.”
In 2010, Roucis auditioned by video for Ed Zwick’s “Love & Other Drugs,” along with other actors with Parkinson’s. In the movie, Anne Hathaway is diagnosed with early onset Parkinson’s, and she gets a morale boost when she attends an unconventional support group where Roucis delivers jokes about the disease.
Zwick was so impressed with Lucy’s audition – and original material – that he asked her to use her own dialogue instead of what he had written for the scene. He wasn’t the first to be charmed by her popular “pros and cons” comedy routine.
“I’m having a wonderful ride on the one-trick pony that I’m on,” she said at the time.
Roucis grew used to meeting caring people who learned of her condition and said, “Oh, how sad.” Laughing at Parkinson’s instead, Roucis said, “just takes the ‘boo-hoo’ right out of it.”
Parkinson’s, she said, made her more tolerant of people who feel sorry for themselves. “I believe in feeling how you feel, and if you are depressed and feeling icky about yourself, then feel it,” she said. “Don’t deny it. Then get the (bleep) over it.”
But Roucis had little patience for those who used the word “courageous” to describe her.
“I don’t think it takes any courage to have this disease,” she said quietly. “Courage is running into a building that’s on fire to get the baby on the third floor. I just don’t correlate myself with having courage, because I have to get up in the morning. I have to get ready for the day. I have to feed myself. I have to go to the bathroom. I have to take my meds. But anyone with an ounce of self-love knows to do what it takes to survive.”
It may be semantics, but others who do take getting out of bed for granted are more liberal with the compliment.
“Lucy is courageous,” said Dr. J. William Langston, founder of the Parkinson’s Institute in Sunnyvale, Calif. “I think her drive and spunk and unwillingness to let this defeat her are extremely impressive and inspirational, both for patients and their caregivers.”
No cause has yet been determined for Roucis’ death. Her sister, Marilyn, said she was found on the floor with no sign of trauma, indicating natural causes. Roucis had known for years what awaited her the longer she outlasted the disease: Total eventual incapacitation. But until then, she was more than willing to become a human face of the disease.
“I know what I am, I know what I have, and I know what I look like,” Roucis said. “I know that I am not scary to look at. So I want to use this face to get in front of people and tell them that life is OK. I hate the term, but this is my journey.”
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