Denise DuBarry Hay lived three full lives and refused to apologize for any of them. Actress, entrepreneur, producer, yoga evangelist, infomercial pioneer—she moved through American pop culture like someone who understood early that relevance is a moving target, and survival means learning how to sell, stretch, and reinvent without losing your center.
She was born March 6, 1956, at Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas, into a military-adjacent childhood that didn’t sit still. Her family bounced through Louisiana and then Central America—Honduras, Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica—before finally settling in California. By the time most kids were learning long division, DuBarry was fluent in Spanish and already accustomed to change. Divorce came early. Responsibility came earlier. At fourteen, she was helping raise her younger siblings while her mother worked. It’s the kind of background that produces either burnout or adaptability. Denise DuBarry chose adaptability.
Hollywood arrived in the usual way: commercials, beauty contests, bit parts, and long nights in acting classes with Milton Katselas and Charles Conrad. She modeled, posed, smiled on cue, and learned how to take rejection without flinching. She landed beer ads, Camaro spots, and the kind of television appearances that look small on paper but matter when you’re building momentum.
Her face became familiar in the late 1970s. She showed up in Deadman’s Curve, Charlie’s Angels, Trapper John, M.D., and Match Game ’78. She landed a regular role in the WWII aviation series Black Sheep Squadron as Lt. Samantha Green—competent, composed, and slightly smarter than the chaos around her. It was steady work, the kind actors kill for, and it made her visible without making her famous.
Then Hal Ashby cast her in Being There (1979), placing her quietly inside one of the most elegant political satires American cinema ever produced. As Johanna Franklin, she didn’t steal scenes—she didn’t need to. Ashby liked actors who understood restraint. DuBarry did.
By the early 1980s, she had married actor Gary Lockwood and co-founded Xebec Productions. Acting was still part of the picture, but something else was happening: she was learning the machinery behind the camera. Development. Fundraising. Packaging. Control. This wasn’t the usual path for actresses of the era, especially ones still young enough to be told to “wait your turn.”
She didn’t wait.
In 1979, she discovered yoga. Not as a trend, not as branding, but as a discipline. By 1986, she owned Malibu Yoga, catering to a celebrity clientele long before wellness became a Silicon Valley obsession. She later partnered in a Bikram Yoga studio in Palm Desert. Yoga wasn’t an escape from Hollywood—it was armor.
The real pivot came in 1988.
DuBarry co-produced Play the Piano Overnight, an infomercial that rewired the idea of what late-night television could do. It didn’t just sell—it instructed, promised transformation, and delivered enough hope to keep viewers watching. It won the Billboard Music Award for Best Music Instruction Video. Then came Play the Guitar Overnight, which won the same award in 1991. Denise DuBarry wasn’t dabbling. She was building an industry lane before most people understood the road.
In 1990, she and her third husband, Bill Hay, co-founded Thane International. For fifteen years, she served as chief creative officer, shaping the voice, aesthetics, and psychology of direct-response television. If you’ve ever watched an infomercial at 2 a.m. and thought, Maybe this actually could change my life, you were inside a world Denise DuBarry helped design.
She understood something crucial: infomercials weren’t about desperation. They were about possibility. About agency. About control. Same themes that had been running through her life since childhood.
In 2005, she founded Kaswit, Inc., continuing her work in direct-response marketing. Through Blue Moxie Entertainment, she produced the feature film Shoot the Hero, which premiered at the Palm Springs International Film Festival in 2010. She never stopped creating. She just changed the scale.
Her later acting appearances—Do It or Die, Walk to Vegas, Senior Moment—felt less like comebacks and more like check-ins. Proof that she could still step in front of a camera whenever she felt like it.
Denise DuBarry Hay died on March 23, 2019, at UCLA Medical Center, at age 63, from complications related to Candida auris, a rare and aggressive fungal infection. It was a quiet ending for someone who had spent decades mastering volume, pitch, and persuasion.
She left behind her husband Bill Hay, her four children—including actress Samantha Lockwood—and a legacy that doesn’t fit neatly into any single category. She wasn’t just an actress who pivoted to business. She wasn’t just a wellness advocate who understood capitalism. She was a connector. Someone who saw how performance, health, storytelling, and selling were all variations of the same act: convincing people they could be more than they were five minutes ago.
Denise DuBarry Hay didn’t chase fame. She engineered relevance. And in an industry that eats the unprepared alive, that might be the most radical performance of all.
