INSIDE

The wood-burning fire in her living room today crackles with her story.

“I remember sitting in the audience at ‘Chapter Two’ and thinking, ‘Wow, just one time, let me be on stage with an actor as good and as realistic as Larry Luckinbill,” she says. “He got all the jokes, totally believed what he was saying….But you can’t tell him all this, head gets too big. But he can’t hear too well, so it’s probably all right.”

When the stars first met, Lucie refused to take the rebound-girl role.

Larry dated a few people and “I went off and had a lovely affair with someone, too.”

When they both came to their senses, they sealed the deal in 1980.

The duo first performed the play “Whose Life Is It Anyway?” as newlyweds.

“When we first got together, I knew from looking at him he’d be this magnificent actor… but with plays. I had been doing the ‘Here’s Lucy’ show for many years, so I’d come prepared, knew all my lines, knew my blocking and knew you’d get this thing done, and it wasn’t brain surgery,” Lucie says.

That’s when the “humiliation factor,” or as she calls it, “the HF” came in.

“We’d go on stage and Larry would ask a million, freakin’ questions, ‘Where do I sit? Where do I go? Why do I do this?’ and I was sooooo embarrassed,” she says. “But around two-and-a-half weeks (of rehearsal) he’s flawless, knows all his lines, we’re about to open, have our tech rehearsal, and I have a breakdown.”

Questions and an artist’s insecurities flooded Lucie’s mind.

“I realized, that if you don’t figure this stuff out right in the beginning, you’re going to question, ‘Why the hell am I doing this?’” she says. “You had to get it right.”

Larry agrees that it was a challenge to perform together in the early years.

“The material we were doing was not easy,” he admits. “Even ‘Social Security,’ which is a comedy by Andrew Bergman, is a layer of complexity, and it’s hysterically funny. But you have to really know who these people are and why that’s funny.”

While Lucie has honed her nightclub routines, documentary production work and television and movie performances, it is the live theater that is the cornerstone of her career.

“I like the high-wire act,” she says. “The create it, prepare it, learn it, know it, then toss everything out of the way, pull up the curtain and let me do it. I don’t know if it’s the pressure or the excitement… of proving that you know what you’re doing and nobody else can save your ass.”