DURING the Seventies, she was the ultimate Girl Next Door – but 50 years on this star prefers a quiet life compared to one in the spotlight.
Susan Dey shot to fame in 1970 as a cast member of TV series, The Partridge Family.
Playing Laurie Partridge, the sister of David Cassidy’s Keith Partridge, Susan became everyone’s best friend to check in on after school on TV.
Appearing on the show from 1970 to 1974, Susan was 17 when she became a teen idol, and came across as loving and down to earth.
Despite being a member of the Partridge Family band, whose hits include I Think I Love You, Susan technically had little musical talent, and instead performed as a keyboardist and backing vocalist, performing along to session musicians’ work.
However, the smiley demeanour of Laurie hid an inner struggle for Susan behind the scenes, and years later she would admit she developed an eating disorder while struggling to the sudden fame it afforded her.
She would later completely sever ties with the cast and has refused to appear in anything to do with The Partridge Family.
In his 1994 memoir, David Cassidy claimed they had a short-lived romance while on set.
Shirley Jones, who played mother Shirley Partridge on the show, wrote in her memoir that Susan had an “unrequited crush” on co-star David during their time together on the show.
She wrote: “Throughout the series, Susan Dey continued to be crazy about David, but he didn’t handle her emotions for him particularly well or sensitively.”
“She wouldn’t listen to my advice to stay away from David, and I found myself warning her over and over against getting involved with him,” she added.
David Cassidy died in 2017 at the age of 67, after privately receiving a dementia diagnosis.
Intensely private, Susan’s dislike for the public eye increased further when a US tabloid planted an informant in her support group for Alcoholics Anonymous.
She would later tell Parade Magazine: “I usually don’t talk about it because I feel it’s my business and nobody else’s.”
“After I had been sober for a year, I was given a cake at a meeting. The tabloids ran a big story about it. I was furious that they had planted an informant in my AA group.”
Despite her issues with the Partridge Family limelight, Susan continued to act, and her credits include a TV adaptation of Little Women in 1978, LA Law from 1986 to 1992, and Love And War from 1992 to 1993.
For LA Law she was nominated for three primetime Emmys and won a Golden Globe for best actress in a drama in 1988.
That same year, she married producer Bernard Sorfronski, and the pair remain together to this day.
She has one daughter from her previous marriage, who was born in 1978.
In 2004, Susan quit the world of acting, with her last role being in two episodes of Third Watch, a serial drama that focuses on the emergency services of New York.
She has been rarely seen since, preferring to lead a quiet life with a low profile.
