Above: Lucy Deakins and River Phoenix in "Little Nikita"
Deakins in "The Boy Who Could Fly"
Deakins todayLucy Deakins: From
Actress to Attorney
We were watching a 1991 episode of "Law and Order" and were surprised to see Lucy Deakins, who we best remember for director Nick Castle's "The Boy Who Could Fly." She also spent a year on the soap "As the World Turns," from 1984 to 1985. Pretty and earnest, the New York native seemed to have disappeared from the acting world. The daughter of two university professors, she graduated in 1994 from Harvard, with a degree in comparative religion. She backpacked across Europe, moved to Port Townsend, Washington and dabbled in different occupations. Deakins enrolled in boatbuilding school, worked as an EMT and signed up to be a firefighter. She eventually became a paralegal and moved to Denver, Colorado in 1999, the same year she married her husband, J.J. Arnold, a painter and sculptor. Their daughter Mason was born in February 2000 and two years later the family moved to New York City. She enrolled in law school in Seattle, graduated in 2007. Although she was admitted to the New York Bar, the family returned to Denver and is a an attorney at Fulbright & Jaworski.
