VALERIE PERRINE

(3 September 1943 – 23 March 2026)

Valerie Ritchie Perrine was born in Galveston, Texas, to Winifred McGinley, a former dancer, and Kenneth Perrine, a lieutenant in the US army. A natural dancer like her mother, Valerie got her first taste of the entertainment business as a showgirl in Las Vegas at the Stardust Resort and Casino. In Los Angeles she met an agent at a dinner party who was looking for a girl to play Montana Wildhack, a porn actress, in George Roy Hill’s Slaughterhouse Five (1972).

Success then came quickly and in 1973 she appeared in Lamont Johnson’s The Last American Hero. Jeff Bridges played the Nascar driver Junior Johnson, who is helped by Marge (Perrine) as the race organiser’s secretary. She then played Honey, the wife of Lenny Bruce, in Bob Fosse’s Lenny, a biopic of the stand-up comic played by Dustin Hoffman. It garnered six Academy Award nominations including one for Perrine, who also won a Bafta and was voted best actress at Cannes. She was Carlotta Monti, companion to W C Fields in W.C. Fields and Me, then Christopher Reeve came along in Superman in which she played Eve Teschmacher, accomplice to Lex Luthor. She also worked with Robert Redford and Jane Fonda on Sydney Pollack’s The Electric Horseman, playing the former wife of a rodeo champion. Although it cost a lot to make, the film was a huge commercial success, coining in some $82 million on an outlay of $12.5 million, but it was not popular with the critics.

Valerie Perrine went on to make more films but never really repeated her initial success. Can’t Stop the Music (1980) with the Village People was a turkey for everybody concerned. The Border, a crime thriller directed by Tony Richardson with Jack Nicholson, Harvey Keitel and Warren Oates, lacked real excitement. Water was a British comedy (written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais) but even with Michael Caine it rarely hit its comic targets. Among Perrine’s later films were Boiling Point, with Wesley Snipes and Dennis Hopper, Peter Yates’ Curtain Call with James Spader, Michael Caine and Maggie Smith, Nancy Meyers’ What Women Want with Mel Gibson and Helen Hunt and many others but none that showed off her particular talents. She played herself in her last film, the 2017 documentary The Fabulous Allan Carr, about the Hollywood producer of (quietly, Can’t Stop the Music) and (a little louder) La Cage aux Folles.

As a resident of Las Vegas in her early years, Perrine was engaged to a gun collector, Bill Haarman, who died from an accidental gunshot wound in 1969, just a month before their planned wedding. Perrine then had a relationship with the hair stylist Jay Sebring but he and three other friends were murdered by the Manson family.

Valerie Perrine was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2015. Her life was recorded in a documentary by Stacey Souther called Valerie, about her career and her experience with Parkinson’s. The film was shown at the Edmonton Film Festival in 2020. She had a long career with some success and seems to have been fairly happy in her choice of work until the last stages of her life. She died in Beverly Hills aged 82.

MICHAEL DARVELL