Valerie Perrine, who has died aged 82, was a game, sparky performer who started her career as a Las Vegas showgirl, emerged into the Hollywood of the early 1970s, and thereafter ran the gamut, winning a BAFTA and a Cannes Best Actress prize for playing Lenny Bruce’s stripper girlfriend in Lenny (1974), enjoying blockbuster success with Superman (1978) and gyrating alongside the Village People in the cult musical Can’t Stop the Music (1980).
Her transition from stage to screen was, as Perrine herself admitted, a matter of being in the right place with the right look at the right time: “I didn’t come to Hollywood to be a movie star. I was literally discovered at a small dinner party at a friend’s house. I never had an acting class. I was offered a seven-year contract with Universal after a couple of days shooting. Universal forbid me from going to acting classes. They didn’t want my natural talent to be corrupted.”
She made a high-profile screen debut as the pornstar Montana Wildhack in George Roy Hill’s adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1972), where her inexperience worked in her favour. Upon arriving for her screen test, Perrine realised she didn’t have the required headshots to hand over; when the producers learned she’d been working as a showgirl, they asked her to pose in her skimpy costume – which she did have – and subsequently landed the role.
For some while, Perrine was cast more for her voluptuous figure than her mind or talent, a situation she leant into by posing for Playboy in 1972; she earned a further measure of notoriety upon becoming the first woman to appear topless on US network television, the result of her shower scene in the PBS drama Steambath (1973).
It was Bob Fosse who saw hidden depths in Perrine, casting the actress as Honey Harlow, the showgirl who caught the eye of troubled stand-up Lenny Bruce (played by Dustin Hoffman), in his black-and-white biopic Lenny. The role entailed unlearning everything she’d picked up in Vegas: “[Fosse] choreographed the dance scenes. But I was supposed to dance badly… Here I was working with the greatest directors and choreographers in the business and I had to dance badly! The irony!”
Yet she held her own against the fractious Hoffman in the film’s dramatic scenes and found herself in demand on the awards circuit, earning an Oscar nomination, the Cannes Best Actress prize and two BAFTA nods: as at the Oscars, she lost Best Actress to Ellen Burstyn, star of Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), but picked up a consolation gong in the Most Promising Newcomer category, beating out no less a figure than Robert De Niro in The Godfather Part II (1974).
At that point, it appeared as if things were beginning to turn in Perrine’s favour. She had a narrow escape when the flight carrying her to the San Sebastián festival to promote Lenny crashed shortly after take-off from a small airport in the Pyrenees; not only did the actress walk away unharmed, but she was later observed returning to the wreck to retrieve her make-up kit. Yet her subsequent career only sporadically achieved cruising altitude, a result of iffy script choices and life intervening.
She landed her most prominent role as Eve Teschmacher, PA and girlfriend to Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor in Superman (1978) and Superman II (1980), shot back-to-back. Yet she never quite capitalised on this newfound visibility: she picked up a slightly thankless role as Robert Redford’s ex-wife, discarded in favour of Jane Fonda, in Sydney Pollack’s rodeo romance The Electric Horseman (1979), before signing up for Can’t Stop the Music, a notorious turn-of-the-Eighties flop.
The latter, a showcase for the novelty disco outfit Village People, again drew on Perrine’s showgirl training: she splashed around topless in a tub to the strains of “YMCA”. Yet a fallout between the star and director Nancy Walker complicated the shoot; the reviews were dire; and the box-office was all but disastrous, the film taking $2m against a $20m budget. (Its campier aspects have since been embraced: the Australian network Channel 9 screens the film every New Year’s Eve.)
Compounding this setback, Perrine turned down Kathleen Turner’s career-making role in Body Heat (1981) but she found more substantial employment in Tony Richardson’s The Border (1982) as the social-climber wife spurring Jack Nicholson’s corrupt border guard on to greater misdeeds. Even critic Pauline Kael, never a fan, offered praise, albeit in a backhanded way: “Perrine, who has been giving disgraceful performances for several years, plays the dumb-tart wife to whiny perfection.”
Of the actors’ guru Stanislavsky, Perrine once said “I don’t know anything about Chavanasky [sic] or whatever you call him. I really don’t think about anything until I get on the set.” For her, acting was an enjoyable social activity: she claimed to have dropped LSD 400 times and was renowned for the wild parties she threw at her house in Sherman Oaks. Asked in a 2023 interview with The Hollywood Reporter what made her shindigs so special, Perrine had a one-word response: “Cocaine.”
Valerie Ritchie Perrine was born in Galveston, Texas on September 3, 1943 to Kenneth Perrine, a lieutenant colonel in the US Army and his wife Winifred (née McGinley), a former dancer in the provocative Broadway troupe The Earl Carroll Vanities. She spent most of her childhood in Japan, where her father was stationed at the end of World War II; aged four, she began performing ceremonial dances to friends of the family (“I wanted to show off”).
In her teens, the family relocated to a ranch in Scottsdale, Arizona. Her father, who had adapted poorly to civilian life, began drinking, prompting Perrine to run off to Vegas in the hope of becoming a showgirl: “I was almost nineteen when I got there. I had to lie about my age to work… We had fun. But you have to remember being a showgirl is very time consuming. All you do is work and sleep.”
She eventually worked her way up to appearing in the spectacular Lido de Paris revue, falling in with the showbiz crowd who commuted between the Vegas Strip and Sunset Boulevard. On the night of August 9, 1969, she was due to attend a party in the Hollywood Hills with her then-boyfriend, the celebrity hairstylist Jay Sebring, but after one of her fellow dancers fell ill, she was called upon to work instead. It was another narrow escape: the party was that crashed by the so-called Manson Family, and Sebring numbered among their victims.
Perrine worked more sparingly as the new millennium approached. She appeared alongside Billy Crystal and Jeff Goldblum in the Three Little Pigs episode of Faerie Tale Theatre (1982-87), had fun making the St. Lucia-shot La Frenais/Clement comedy Water (1985) with Michael Caine (“the nicest human being I’ve ever worked with”), and popped up in the Ally Sheedy teen comedy Maid to Order (1987) and the Wesley Snipes thriller Boiling Point (1993).
TV became a regular source of income, offering guest roles in Homicide: Life on the Street (1993-99), medical hit e.r. (1994-2009) and Nash Bridges (1996-2001), where she played a gangster’s moll. Her last major movie was the Mel Gibson comedy What Women Want (2000); thereafter, she returned to TV, appearing on David Spade’s Just Shoot Me (1997-2003) and sitcom Grounded for Life (2001-05), and became a favourite on the convention circuit. Her final screen credit came with the retirement home comedy Silver Skies (2016), opposite George Hamilton.
Though she enjoyed relationships with the likes of Jeff Bridges (her co-star in 1972’s The Last American Hero), Mick Jagger and Dodi Fayed, she never married; she was engaged during her showgirl years to the businessman and gun collector Bill Haarman, who died when the pistol he habitually carried fell from his waistband and discharged in a freak accident one month before the couple’s planned wedding.
In her final years, Perrine battled severe health issues: she underwent spinal surgery to correct wear-and-tear incurred during her dancing days and was diagnosed with Parkinson’s after a sound engineer spotted her dialogue was being obscured by the rattle of a saucer she was holding with tremulous hands. In the crowdfunded documentary Valerie (2019), she bemoaned her condition: “I can’t walk. I can’t write. I can’t talk right… I can’t act. I didn’t want the world to think I’d faded away.”
By the time of a 2022 interview for the Parkinson’s Europe website, however, she seemed to have come to terms with her situation: “I’ve always lived in the moment. I don’t dwell on the past or worry about the future. I try to live for today, and Parkinson’s hasn’t changed that.”
Valerie Perrine, born September 3, 1943, died March 23, 2026.
