It was a Wednesday morning in April, and Annie Judis had transformed the kitchen of her Beverly Hills mansion into a film set. With her iPhone balanced on a stand, the 82-year-old adjusted the lighting and smoothed her costume: an aqua spandex workout set that revealed a hint of cleavage, a matching head wrap and tinted glasses.
When it was showtime, her housekeeper hit play on her adopted theme song, the peppy anthem “Good Morning,” by Max Frost. Smiling from ear to ear, Ms. Judis started jumping rope and didn’t stop for a full minute.
“Come on, everybody, let’s move it, let’s go!” she said to the camera. She does this routine nearly every morning, greeting her 187,000 Instagram followers and reminding them: “You’re going to need that energy for the grandkids.”
Ms. Judis currently holds the Guinness World Record for oldest competitive rope skipper. She also thrives on having an audience: If she doesn’t share a workout, she said, it’s like it never happened.
After the filming finished, I sat with Ms. Judis at her kitchen table, looking out onto a lush backyard and blue-tiled pool. Her miniature poodle, Carmen, darted in between our legs.
Ms. Judis has always loved the camera. Early in her life, this propelled her to become a pioneer in Hollywood as a Black model and actress. She started out as a beauty pageant queen, and in 1969 she became one of the first Black women to be featured as a centerfold in Playboy magazine, under the stage name Jean Bell.
The shoot kicked off a career that included a role in Martin Scorsese’s 1973 film “Mean Streets” and performances in several Blaxploitation films throughout the 1970s. She was one of the first Black women to appear in mainstream sitcoms like “Starsky and Hutch” and “The Beverly Hillbillies.”
More recently, Ms. Judis has reveled in not only being the star, but also the director, editor and distributor of her videos. Part show-woman, part motivational speaker, she now considers it her life’s purpose to defy people’s expectations of what their bodies can do — and look like — into their 80s and beyond.
She often carries a rope around with her and is quick to push it on anyone who’ll listen. “People say, ‘I can’t do it, I can’t jump rope.’ I say, ‘just try,’” she said. “Then they realize they can jump, and you get a big smile on their face, like when they were little kids.”
‘I have to keep going.’
Growing up in Houston in the 1940s and ’50s, Ms. Judis enjoyed jumping rope with friends. But almost 60 years passed before she took it up as a calling.
After feeling bored with conventional gym classes and machines, she bought a rope and said she was “shocked” to discover she could only jump for about 30 seconds before feeling winded.
Demetri Theodore, her personal trainer of about 15 years, was skeptical at first. “I said, are you crazy? You’re 74. You’re going to hurt your back, your knees, your whatever, your shoulders, everything,” he said. She quickly proved him wrong.
She challenged herself to jump for a full minute. “Once I start something, I have to keep going,” she said. “It’s in my bones.” The more she practiced, the stronger and more energetic she felt.
Ms. Judis said the idea to try for a Guinness World Record came to her in a dream, several months after she started jumping. She did some research when she woke up, and soon learned that the criteria for earning the record was skipping for at least one minute in an official competition. She signed up for a meet in San Diego.
Three months later, she arrived at the gym where the event was held. At 75, she was the oldest skipper by decades; most were in their teens. She was nervous, but skipped confidently for the required 60 seconds, and secured the title.
As she has defended her record over the years, she’s added more theatrics to her performances. In one memorable act, she walked onstage hunched over and dressed like a caricature of an old woman, cane in hand. Then she dropped the costume, the song “Sexy and I Know It” came on over a loud speaker and she whipped out her jump rope, to whoops and hollers from the crowd. “I had so much fun doing that,” she said. “It was the best one.”
Ms. Judis has become a rare ambassador in the jump rope community, said Roger Palmenberg, 22, who coaches a competitive youth team in Tucson. When she attends local events, she goes out of her way to cheer and encourage younger skippers, he said. In 2024, she even wrote a children’s book, “Beverly Hills Jump Rope Queen.”
“Jump rope doesn’t have as much outreach as other sports,” Mr. Palmenberg said. “She brings it to so many.”
‘That rope saved my life.’
While Ms. Judis loves an audience, her jump rope has also brought her private solace.
A few years before she rediscovered skipping, her husband of four decades, Gary, was diagnosed with dementia. As his health declined, jumping helped her manage the stress of being his caregiver, she said.
“He would be sleeping, and I would go downstairs, and I’d just jump, jump, jump,” she said. “Without starting my day off in the mornings like that, I just couldn’t do it.”
She would even bring her rope to the hospital and jump by his bedside, she said. When he died in 2022, she jumped through her mourning. “That rope saved my life,” she said.
As she has gotten older, Ms. Judis has gotten better at rope skipping, Mr. Theodore said, picking up speed and learning new tricks.
On April 11, she will travel to a middle school gym in Tucson, where she hopes to defend her Guinness record for the eighth year in a row.
On the day I visited her in Beverly Hills, after Ms. Judis greeted her online followers, she spent the next two hours in her home gym. She trained for the upcoming event with different styles of jump ropes. She also did a dead hang, a farmer’s carry holding 80 pounds and a one-minute plank. Mr. Theodore spotted her through each exercise.
Beyond prepping for competitions, Ms. Judis said she now jumps mostly to enjoy her life. And to look good. She occasionally posts videos of herself jumping rope in a bikini. “It’s to get people to look, and see what they can do at my age,” she said.
After her morning workout, Ms. Judis drove us to lunch in her cherry red Escalade, which she has bedazzled — inside and out — with rhinestones.
At a members-only club a block from Rodeo Drive, she ordered a burger with a side of bacon and fries, and a Shirley Temple. “I have a psychological hang-up about vegetables,” she said, noting that she avoids them. She doesn’t drink or smoke, she said, with the exception of the occasional puff of marijuana, which she grows in her backyard.
When she isn’t jumping, she enjoys long lunches with her boyfriend (who is younger than she is, though she wouldn’t divulge his age) and relaxing at home in a plush heated blanket. “It’s my time,” she said of this chapter of her life. “I’m going to squeeze as much as I can in it.”
Back at her home, she told me, “I’ll probably end up dying when I’m jumping rope.”
I asked her if that’s how she’d want to go.
“It’s a good way,” she said, thinking for a beat. “Or making love.”
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