Susan Dey From 'The Partridge Family' Is Gorgeous At 69

Nov 13, 2020 by apost team

Pretty faces are hard to forget, and Susan Dey is one whose face is so cute, some might call it impossible not to remember. The former actress continues to glow even as she approaches her 68th birthday next month. 

Having retired from Hollywood, not many know what she has been up to since her last gig in 2004 with NBC's crime drama series, Third Watch. Beginning her career as the quiet keyboardist on The Partridge Family, Dey has come a long way since then.

One of four children, Susan Hallock Dey was born on December 10th, 1952, in Pekin, Illinois. 

Her parents are Robert Smith Dey, a newspaper editor for a group of newspapers on Long Island, and Ruth Dey, a nurse. Ruth died when Dey was eight years old. It was Dey's stepmom Geil that had persuaded her to try her hands out at modeling after seeing a casting ad on an issue of Seventeen magazine.

Dey is best known for her role as Laurie Partridge in The Partridge Family, a musical sitcom that ran from 1970 to 1974. She got the part when she was 17 years old with no prior acting experience besides print modeling, her first break being a cover photo on a tampons booklet.

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As a young actress, Dey's quickly-grown limelight led her to body image issues, and soon developed an eating disorder. According to Worldation, she weighed 92 pounds at her lowest, with her fingers stained orange from eating so many carrots. 

Twenty years later, in an interview with The Enquirer in 1993, the actress admitted that she was still not over her anorexia, saying: 

"I'm not in the clear yet … It's something that has been plaguing my life." She also added that beating a severe eating disorder is "something you cannot do alone."

But that did not stop her from having fun on the show. "It was a great experience," she said on The Rosie O'Donnell Show in 1996. "It was absolutely extraordinary. You're with a group of strangers who got on really, really well."

Dey's impeccable talent and charm opened many doors for her after her four-year stint as Laurie Partridge. Most notably, she was offered the role of Sandy in Grease, which, after she turned down, went to Olivia Newton-John. 

She also appeared as the domineering attorney 'Grace Van Owen' on the NBC drama series L.A. Law from 1986 to 1992. She has had numerous awards in her career, including six Golden Globe nominations with one win in 1988 for L.A. Law and three Emmy nominations.

"I've never won anything in my life before, except now," she said during her speech at the Golden Globes in 1988. "Once I won a turkey in a grocery store raffle and I was very excited about that and then they told me that they fixed it so that I would win."

According to Dey, people were so inspired by Grace Van Owen that they have come up to her and told her that she is the reason they went to law school. After L.A. Law, Dey appeared as a host of Saturday Night Live (SNL) in 1992, when she performed a skit about The Partridge Family versus The Brady Bunch.

Dey briefly dated her on-screen brother on The Partridge Family, the late David Cassidy. She reportedly stopped talking to him after spilling the details about their one night stand in his 1994 memoir. And then in 2013, her other co-star Shirley Jones wrote in her memoir that Dey is the only one who "consistently refuses to take part in any T.V. reunions of The Partridge Family." Jones was also Cassidy's stepmom.

Dey's first marriage was to her then-agent, Lenny Hirshan, in 1976. The two had an age gap of 25 years, with Dey being just 24 years old at that time of their wedding. The couple divorced five years later, and in 1988, she married theatre producer Bernard Sofronski with whom she remains married to this day. The husband and wife currently live in upstate New York. Dey has one daughter, Sara Dey-Hirshan, from her first marriage.

These days, Dey is using her platform to help other people. She currently serves as a board member of the Rape Treatment Center at UCLA.

Together with her former castmate from L.A. Law, Corbin Bernsen, she used her acting background to narrate a documentary about sexual assault on college campuses.

What is your fondest memory from watching The Partridge Family? Let us know in the comments and be sure to pass this along to all the Susan Dey fans in your life!