Actor Penny Dwyer taught her daughter to laugh at sadness

When my friend Penny Dwyer started losing her hair to chemotherapy, she did not despair. She let her 17-year-old daughter cut off what was left of it and turn it into a silly Tik-Tok video.

“I gave her the worst haircut of her life,” Becca Dwyer said of a trendy look that left the back of Penny’s neck looking a bit like a barcode. “But instead of being sad, we just giggled,” Becca said. “That’s how my mom taught me how to live my life – by laughing, and not dwelling in sadness.”

I last spoke to Penny by phone two weeks ago. Over the previous few months, she had largely retreated from all but her closest family as she fully focused on combating a resurgent wave of ovarian cancer that had now made its way to her spine and brain.

She remained characteristically upbeat, determined and yet prototypically practical. She told me with her brutal frankness that her remaining time appeared to be short, and that she was now directing all her strength toward accomplishing one last remaining life goal: Making it to her daughter’s graduation from Cherry Creek High School on May 22.

We made plans to see each other that following Monday. She didn’t say it, but I got the feeling she was starting to say her individual goodbyes. But we never got that chance because, by Monday, Penny had been readmitted to the hospital. And she won’t make it to the Stutler Bowl on May 22, because (bleeping) cancer has now taken everything from her, including her final wish.

Penny Dwyer died peacefully at her Englewood home on Sunday morning. She was 60.

Penny was an actor, but she meant far more to me as a person. I was a groomsman in her 2001 wedding to local actor and producer Paul Dwyer. And for five years, she served as a volunteer board member for a grassroots nonprofit I started called The Denver Actors Fund, which has helped local theater artists pay down their medical bills by $1.4 million.

To be clear, I never do anything fun. But back in the day, I took time to go to Las Vegas for a combined wedding-party pre-party. We spent most of the weekend playing this vintage 25-cent arcade horse-racing game in the basement of the Flamingo Hotel because it was one thing we could all do together. I traveled with Paul and Penny to Boston to see the Colorado Rockies play for the first time in Fenway Park. And I watched them raise their two kids.

Becca is following in her parents’ footsteps as an actor, having last year starred in a serious play at Cherry Creek High School about teenage depression called “The Oregon Trail.” And last fall, she played a cell-block siren in the musical “Chicago.” Despite Penny’s worsening condition, she attended every performance. James, a 21-year-old junior at the University of California Irvine, is a pianist, percussionist and future engineer in training.

I watched the couple weather plenty of times both good and bad. None worse than her cancer diagnosis in January 2023. Penny had lived her adult life under the specter of cancer alongside a mother who has survived several forms of the disease over the past 30 years.

From 1992-2004, Penny performed for pretty much 12 years straight on local stages ranging from the Arvada Center to the Country Dinner Playhouse to the Denver Center’s Garner-Galleria Theatre. She then stepped away from the stage to raise her children.

Her ‘Ruthless’ stage roots

Dwyer was born Nov. 9, 1963, in Houston to Jim and Pat Walzel, and graduated from Trinity University with a bachelor's degree in engineering science. She was in great demand as an actor at theaters in Houston including Theatre Under the Stars, The Alley, Houston and Main Street. She played an astonishing variety of roles there, from Sam Shepard’s “Fool for Love” to “Sweeney Todd.” 

She moved to Colorado in 1992 and made her first stage appearance in Denver in “Ruthless! The Musical” at Theatre on Broadway. Also in that cast: 9-year-old Annaleigh Ashford in her first-ever stage production. Ashford went on to win a 2015 Tony Award for her performance in Broadway's “You Can’t Take it With You.”

For Ashford, Sunday’s news was a punch to the gut.

“Penny had eyes that sparkled as vibrantly as her soul,” Ashford said from Vancouver, where she is filming the true-crime drama series “Happy Face” for Paramount+. “She taught me that kindness and compassion make a dressing room the safest space in a theater.

“She will always be part of who I am as a professional and as a person. I know we will sit at a dressing table someday in Heaven and she will help me get my mascara right one more time. I will love her forever.”

Penny gave her daughter the middle name of Leigh in honor of Ashford and accomplished area choreographer Alann Worley, whose middle name is also Leigh.

“Penny is the most caring, strongest woman I have ever known in my life,” said Worley. 

Through the years, Dwyer rubbed acting elbows with all kinds of bigshots, including Tony Award nominee Beth Malone (“Fun Home”) in the Arvada Center’s “Company,” and TV’s “Supergirl,” Melissa Benoist, now the star of Max’s streaming series “Girls on the Bus.”

When Dwyer starred as Maria in a 2000 production of “The Sound of Music” at Country Dinner Playhouse, the actors playing her stepchildren included three future Broadway stars: Ashford, Benoist and Jesse JP Johnson. (He went on to play Boq in “Wicked.”)

Benoist and her sisters called her “Perfect Penny” throughout their childhood.

"She was just the epitome of grace, kindness and warmth," said Benoist. "She truly exemplified beauty radiating from within. My little sister basically thought she was a real-life princess until she was 6 or 7."

Dwyer was part of a historic ensemble of 31 actresses who performed in Clare Boothe Luce's epic satire “The Women” at the Arvada Center in 2004. Her longest gig was performing for eight months in the immersive dinner comedy “Tony & Tina’s Wedding” for Theatre Group. She was nominated for a 2002 Denver Post Ovation Award for her work in the Arvada Center’s “Crazy for You.”

But if you asked Dwyer her favorite roles, they would include Irene Molloy in “Hello, Dolly!” and Alice Beane in “Titanic” at Country Dinner Playhouse; Renee Vain in “Vampire Lesbians of Sodom” for Theatre Group; and the straight-talkin' waitress Doatsy Mae in the Arvada Center’s "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.”

"I remember thinking she was better at everything than Shirley Jones, and she should have been Marian Paroo opposite Robert Preston in 'The Music Man,' and she should have been all the leads in all of the Rodgers and Hammerstein movies," said Benoist. "She was such a special, glamorous woman that I looked up to as a child.

"I am so grateful that she became found family to my mom, sisters and me, and that I got to remain in her orbit as an adult and learn from her example as a mother to her two incredible kids."

Service to family, community

Penny was named to the Denver Actors Fund’s Board of Directors in 2015 by the late President Brenda Billings, who cited her wisdom, leadership, groundedness, sensibility and sensitivity. “Penny has a great head on her shoulders, and great business sense,” Billings said at the time.

But Dwyer was the volunteer of volunteers, said her daughter. Her nonprofit service also included the Cherry Creek High School Marching Band and Hope United Methodist Church, where Dwyer and others ran a PB&J Club that made sack lunches for the homeless that they distributed in Denver’s Civic Center Park. Even after her children matriculated from Campus Middle School, she still served as a volunteer librarian.

But her appointment to the DAF board was particularly meaningful to her because of its mission to help her fellow artists. Dwyer brought to the post a unique empathy for those in medical need, in part because of her son’s diagnosis on the autism spectrum. She supervised speech and behavioral therapy sessions for James for more than six years.

“We have been lucky that we have been able to afford everything we needed to help our son – but it’s expensive,” Dwyer said at the time of her DAF appointment. “If you were a struggling actor and had a child with autism, I can tell you that would be very difficult.”

James thrived at mainstream public schools and is thriving in his college years now. “And that says a lot about her parenting,” Billings said.

Penny’s whole life, said Worley, was fully devoted to her children. Rebecca was an elite dancer growing up, and Dwyer accompanied her to national competitions in Chicago and Nashville. When her mother got sick, Becca donated her hair to a place that makes wigs for people with cancer. “She’s my best friend,” Becca said.

And when she was diagnosed, “Penny did not complain once about having cancer – not once,” said Paul Dwyer. Instead, she faced it all with humor. “Her contact name in my phone was ‘Baldy’ for a while,” Rebecca said with a laugh. “She thought it was funny.”

Whenever you asked how Penny was doing, she would say, “I’m doing the best I can," her husband said. “And she was. Every day.”

To Benoist, one thing is certain: "She will always be Perfect Penny in my book."

A celebration of life will be held at 3 p.m. Friday, April 26, at Hope United Methodist Church, 5101 S Dayton St. Greenwood Village, CO 80111. The service will be live-streamed at youtube.com. In lieu of flowers, the family is asking that donations be made to the Denver Actors Fund in Penny Dwyer's name at P.O. Box 11182, Denver, CO, 80211, or online at coloradogives.org.