In the “so bad it’s good” classic Showgirls, lead Elizabeth Berkley and her fellow Las Vegas dancers aspire to someday becoming stars. For one real-life showgirl in the late ’60s, that dream actually come true. Actress Valerie Perrine, who left the Vegas Strip for Hollywood and went on to become a screen sex symbol as well as an Academy Award nominee, passed away this week at the age of 82.
Born in Galveston, Texas, in 1943, Valerie Ritchie Perrine (the surname rhymes with “divine”) was the daughter of a U.S. Army officer and a former stage dancer. Her “military brat” childhood took her from Texas to Japan to Arizona. After graduating high school and briefly attending the University of Arizona, Valerie moved to Vegas and became a performer in the Stardust casino’s “Lido de Paris” revue. After her fiancé died in a gun mishap in 1969, she migrated to Southern California. While dating celebrity hairdresser Jay Sebring she was due to attend a Benedict Canyon party with him, but had to work. Tragically, Sebring and the other party guests were killed by members of the Charles Manson “family.”
A chance encounter with a casting agent led Perrine, who hadn’t considered acting, to audition at Universal for their 1972 adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. Up for the role of adult film star-turned-interplanetary abductee Montana Wildhack, Perrine recalled, “They told me to wear a bikini because they wanted to see what my body looked like. … I didn’t have a bikini, so I wore my Vegas costume.” Needless to say, it worked. Along with her Slaughterhouse screen debut, 1972 also found Perrine featured in a Playboy pictorial (she would pose again and be a cover model in 1981).
Valerie co-starred with Jeff Bridges in the 1973 NASCAR drama The Last American Hero. Never one to shy away from showing off her body, she made broadcast television history that same year when she went topless for a public TV production of Bruce Jay Friedman’s offbeat allegory Steambath. Only 24 PBS stations carried the controversial Hollywood Television Theater episode.
Perrine’s critical breakthrough came when she was tapped to play Honey Bruce, stripper wife of taboo-busting comedian Lenny Bruce (Dustin Hoffman), in director Bob Fosse’s acclaimed 1974 biodrama Lenny. Her performance earned Perrine a Best Actress Academy Award nomination, but she lost to Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore star Ellen Burstyn. Perrine was another funnyman’s love interest in the 1975 box office flop W.C. Fields and Me, and she was a private eye hired to stop a late billionaire’s Italian heir (Terence Hill) from claiming his inheritance in the 1977 action romp Mr. Billion.
Her most famous film role came in 1978, when Valerie played Eve Teschmacher, the girlfriend/aide of criminal mastermind Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman), in Superman: The Movie. The seemingly more competent of Luthor’s two assistants, “Miss Teschmacher” nonetheless saves the Man of Steel (Christopher Reeve) from Lex’s Kryptonite death trap. Perrine, along with most of her co-stars, came back three years later for Superman II.
Perrine received good reviews for her performance as rodeo champ Robert Redford’s estranged wife in the 1979 romcom The Electric Horseman. The critics were less kind, however, the following year, when she appeared with Steve Guttenberg, Caitlyn (then Bruce) Jenner, and The Village People in producer Allan Carr’s disco-drenched megabomb Can’t Stop the Music. “It ruined my career…I moved to Europe after, I was so embarrassed,” she confessed in an interview.
Her ’80s films included an uncredited cameo in 1981’s The Cannonball Run; playing immigration officer Jack Nicholson’s wife in 1982’s The Border; co-starring alongside Michael Caine in the 1985 Caribbean-set satire Water; and as a nouveau riche Malibu housewife in 1987’s Maid to Order. The last role was similar to one she played in a 1986 CBS sitcom, Leo & Liz in Beverly Hills. Co-created by Steve Martin and also featuring Harvey Korman, the show only lasted six episodes. Valerie’s film work in the ’90s was likewise limited, with key parts in the 1991 road drama Bright Angel and with Wesley Snipes in the 1993 actioner Boiling Point. She was a frequent guest on the small screen at this time, with appearances on Northern Exposure, Homicide: Life on the Street, ER, and Walker, Texas Ranger.
While Perrine had a key supporting turn in the hit 2000 comedy What Women Want, health issues were beginning to affect her. The actress’s final big-screen role was in the indie seriocomedy Silver Skies in 2015, the same year she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Her experiences with the debilitating neurodegenerative condition was chronicled in a 2020 documentary simply titled Valerie. The film’s director, Stacey Souther, said of his good friend, “She faced Parkinson’s disease with incredible courage and compassion, never once complaining.” Perrine passed away on March 23 at her Beverly Hills home.