WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO: Lucy Deakins

If you were to add up all of the credits by Lucy Deakins, including individual TV episodes, you would get less than a dozen different performances.

Yet, many of them were the lead roles. Her career was essentially over in less than a decade. She did more in that short time than many actors whose career spans decades do.

Born in New York City to two college professor parents, she got started acting on the soap opera AS THE WORLD TURNS. This would lead to her first film.


She played Milly, the lead in THE BOY WHO COULD FLY. She was wonderful as a girl whose neighbor (Jay Underwood) is an autistic boy who believes he can fly. Directed by Nick Castle (of Moviezzz Blog favorite T.A.G: THE ASSASSINATION GAME fame), the film wasn’t a big box office hit, yet was quite popular on video.

She played the girlfriend of River Phoenix in LITTLE NIKITA. The film also starred Sidney Poitier. Again, it wasn’t a big box office hit, but was a popular cable title.

1988’s John Hughes film THE GREAT OUTDOORS was next, the Dan Akroyd and John Candy go on vacation film, also with Annette Bening. Lucy played the girlfriend of Chris Young.


Then came 1989’s CHEETAH. Lucy starred in this Disney film. with Keith Coogan as a brother and sister living in Kenya.

In the 1990, she would star in an Afterschool Special. Her acting career started to slow down at this time. There was an episode of LAW & ORDER. She appeared in THERE GOES MY BABY along with Rick Schroder, Noah Wyle, and Jill Schoelen. This was a fairly good film set in the 1960’s. And there was a final TV movie, A MOTHER’S GIFT, in 1995.

And that was it.


So, What Ever Happened To Her?

Part of the reason Lucy’s life started to slow down in the late 80’s was, from 1988 to 1994, she was attending Harvard. Her major was comparative religion.

Once she graduated, that was pretty much the end of her career. In 1999, she was married and soon after she had a daughter.

In 2002, she moved to New York City. While living there, she took a brief acting role in another episode of LAW AND ORDER. She also recorded a commentary track for THE BOY WHO COULD FLY's 2003 DVD release. That would be the end of her acting career as she was about to head in a different direction.

She and her family moved to Seattle where she enrolled at the University of Washington. In 2007, she graduated from law school.

She is now a practicing attorney at a firm in New York. She is a litigator with the firm.

So, from actress to lawyer.

In Lucy’s case, acting was much like a summer job. How many of us worked in a restaurant, or at an amusement park, Lucy made films. The only difference was, those films still live today. She has something to show for it.

While she has moved on to a serious life, the films remain. THE BOY WHO COULD FLY still stands as one of the better family films of the decade.

Lucy Deakins on DVD