Actress and former dancer Valerie Perrine, famous for playing Lex Luthor’s secretary and lover in Superman: the movie (1978) and its 1980 sequel, died this Monday at the age of 82 at her home in Los Angeles, as announced by her friend, film producer Stacey Souther. The Parkinson’s disease that she had been diagnosed with in 2015 had caused her to retire from acting and, more recently, lose her mobility. “She faced the illness with incredible courage and compassion, she never complained. She was a true inspiration who lived life to the fullest – and what a magnificent life it was -. The world feels less beautiful without her in it,” Souther, who cared for her for years, wrote on her Instagram account.
In addition to his role in the superhero film, his career achieved special relevance with his work in Lennythe Bob Fosse film starring Dustin Hoffman, in which she played the wife stripper and drug addict by Lenny Bruce, which earned her an Oscar nomination, the best actress award at the Cannes festival and a BAFTA for best new actress. He also shared the screen with Jeff Bridges in the last american hero (1973), by Lamont Johnson, and played the future ex-wife of Robert Redford’s rodeo champion character in The electric rider (1979), the Sydney Pollack.
Although she was always praised, above all, for her acting work, she was also considered a sex symbol of her time: she was photographed naked several times for the magazine Playboy —something she would later regret—and in 1973 she became the first woman to intentionally show her breasts on television when she appeared in the PBS film, Steambath. “I don’t consider myself the typical sex symbol. I’m not really beautiful, and my body is not perfect. I don’t mind showing my breasts. I don’t think they are something that shouldn’t be shown… only when I have something else to offer,” she said in an interview for The New York Times.
Perrine was born on September 3, 1943 in Galveston (Texas). She was the daughter of a Scottish dancer and a lieutenant colonel in the US Army. He spent his childhood following his father’s military postings, from Japan to Paris, passing through many other places. She briefly studied psychology at the University of Arizona, but left to work as a dancer in Las Vegas for five years. There, he told NOW, She started as a backup singer in the back row for $245 a week and became a principal dancer for $800 a week in the show. Paris Lido del Hotel Stardust.
Fed up with that world, she traveled through Europe for nine months before settling in Hollywood, where she began to live on subsidies and social assistance until she met who would be her agent, Robert Walker, at a friend’s birthday party. He told her, the actress said: “You would be perfect for the role of Montana Wildhack,” the porn film actress from Slaughterhouse Fivedirected by George Roy Hill. In that film he finally debuted in acting. “They asked me to wear a bikini because they wanted to see what my body was like,” she said in another 2013 interview with screenwriter Larry Karaszewski. “I didn’t have a bikini, so I put on my Las Vegas costume.”
She never took acting classes and described her success on screen by her attempt to be true. “I don’t know anything about Chavanasky, or whatever his name is. I don’t really know what I’m doing. I don’t think about anything until I get on set. I just learn my lines, period. Then when I’m on set, I think about something that’s happened to me in the past. In the crying sequence with Dustin in LennyI remembered an old boyfriend who hurt me, and that really inspired me,” she said in the interview with the New York newspaper.
Along with Alan Arkin he acted in The Wizard of Lublin (1979) and with Jack Nicholson in The border (1982). Perrine continued working until 2016 on characters such as Margo in What do women think about? with Mel Gibson, before retiring with fifty series and films on his resume.
The illness she suffered for a decade had drained all her savings and her friend Souther had launched a donation fund to help her cover medical and care costs. For the same reason, Souther has launched a new fund to bury the actress’s body in Forest Lawn Cemetery, which was, the producer says, what she wanted. “After more than 15 years fighting Parkinson’s, her finances are exhausted. Let’s get together to make her last wish come true. She really deserves it,” he wrote in his farewell message on Instagram.