A True Grande Dame: From The Great White Way to the Great South Bay
Volume 49, Issue 10
By Mike Lavers

With the bright lights of the Great White Way and Hollywood safely across the Great South Bay, actress and long-time Fire Island Pines resident Susan Willis has time to focus on what really matters. She spends her days painting the island’s numerous sea and dunescapes, watches the migratory birds that make their seasonal home among the pine barrens, bogs and dune grass and spends time with her many friends in the community.

These activities are sure to keep any active retiree busy but Willis, who would only tell The News that she is younger than 92 but older than a tender 21, said that the Pines is much more than an island getaway.

“I just long for this,” she said while she sat on the deck of her beachfront apartment and listened to the crashing surf. “[This] is where I can catch up. I try to get here as much as I can.”

Willis, whose career has spanned more than 50 years, has appeared in Broadway’s “Gypsy,” “Cabaret,” “The Merchant of Venice,” “Fiddler on the Roof,” the daytime soap “All My Children,” and dozens of other theatrical and television programs. And perhaps it is only appropriate that she has chosen to spend her golden years in the Pines. Yet, in true form, Willis is quick to point out that she is far from retirement.

She has appeared in several incarnations of the popular crime drama “Law and Order” and played Irene Terwilliger alongside Jim Carrey in the 2001 film “The Majestic.” Willis also played Mrs. Prior in “ Mystic River” alongside Sean Penn and Kevin Bacon and is to appear in the film “Life Free or Die,” which is scheduled for release next year.

“I am usually the nosey neighbor who spills the beans and knows where the bodies are,” she joked.

Outside of Hollywood, Willis is a charter member of the Fire Island Pines Arts Project and recently appeared in their summer production “And the World Goes ‘Round.” She also organizes the weekly Episcopal services in The Pines but admitted that it is sometimes difficult to bring the faithful to Sunday services.

“Who wants to go to Mass at 1 p.m. in the Pines?” she asked. “People are on their second bloody Mary and are on their way to the beach.”

Willis, who made her triumphant debut at age four when she played a butterfly in a beauty pageant in her native Ohio, added that this reality is simply another unique fact of life in the Pines. But she also took note of the dramatic changes that have transformed the community from an isolated fishing and hunting encampment into an exclusive oceanfront resort since she first stepped foot on the island in the early 1950s.

“There are lovely organic houses and now I guess that the guys have so much money and they decide to do this and this and that,” Willis said while pointing out 103-year-old Alice Thorpe’s cottage from the deck of her upstairs neighbors Tony LaRocco and Bill Moore.

She jokingly added that she is content with her new neighbors as long as they buy their groceries locally at the Pines Pantry. And while Willis admitted that she totes her own organic vegetables in from the mainland from time to time, she added that she treasures the laid-back isolation that the Pines continues to offer.