Actor Penny Dwyer taught her daughter to laugh at sadness
Stage actor Penny Dwyer performed in dozens of productions on Colorado theater stage. She died at age 60 from cancer on April 7, 2024.
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.
