Just caught the end of "Mask" on TV, and got to clicking around. I didn't know most of this.

http://www.people.com/people/archive/ar ... 92,00.html

She was a strong-willed, flamboyant divorcee with a taste for drugs and bikers. He was her son, a disfigured boy who spent 16 years under a death sentence. Rocky Dennis was born with craniodiaphyseal dysplasia, which distorted his face, making it grow to twice its normal size.

Mask, the powerful Peter Bogdanovich film, tells their story. Splendid performances from Cher and Eric Stoltz, and a deft screenplay from first-timer Anna Hamilton Phelan—who saw Rocky while visiting UCLA's Center for Genetic Research—reveal mother and son as they were: not tin angels or cardboard martyrs, but raucous comrades who shared a kind of outlaw bond. Together they constructed a life unimpeded by self-pity.


http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cg ... d=16644704

Florence "Rusty" Tullis, the strong-willed biker mother of a son with a rare, disfiguring disease who inspired the 1985 movie "Mask," has died. She was 70. Ms. Tullis died of an infection Nov. 11 at a Montebello hospital about a month after being injured in a motorcycle accident, her niece said. Ms. Tullis was driving a three-wheeled motorcycle through an intersection in Azusa on Oct. 14 when the right tire fell off and she lost control. The motorcycle struck a curb, throwing her from the bike and into a telephone pole, Azusa police said.

Funny that you would post this. I was reading a story just the other day about a child who has this and I did some research on Rocky and Rusty too.

Rusty may have been a wild woman, but her fierce love for her son (as portrayed in the movie anyway) was inspirational.