Valerie Perrine, whose memorable film roles included a porn actress abducted by aliens in Slaughterhouse-Five, Lex Luthor’s secretary in two Superman films and, in an Oscar-nominated performance, the wife of Lenny Bruce in Lenny, died at her home in Beverly Hills today following a 15-year battle with Parkinson’s disease. She was 82.
Her death was announced by friend Stacey Souther, who has set up a GoFundMe page to help defray funeral costs.
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“Valerie Perrine gave everything she had to her craft, her fans, and her life — with grace, humor, and an indomitable spirit that Parkinson’s itself could never fully extinguish,” Souther writes. “Let’s make sure her final chapter is written with the same dignity and love that she gave to all of us.”
Born September 3, 1943, in Galveston, Texas, Perrine became a Las Vegas showgirl in 1968 before moving to Las Vegas. She later recalled that at a dinner party she met an agent who was looking for someone to play the character of softcore porn actress Montana Wildhack in George Roy Hill’s film adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. “That’s how I became an actress,” she said in a 2025 interview.
In 1973, Perrine was cast in the PBS presentation of Bruce Jay Friedman’s acclaimed hit Off Broadway play Steambath, a performance that’s often credited for including the first appearance of naked female breasts in network TV history.
If Perrine’s performances to that point had been as infamous as famous, she proved any naysayers wrong in 1974 when she gave an Oscar-nominated (and Cannes-winning) performance in Bob Fosse’s Lenny, playing Lenny Bruce’s stripper wife Honey Bruce opposite Dustin Hoffman’s title character. She followed up that role by appearing two years later in Arthur Hiller’s well-received W.C. Fields biopic W.C. and Me; she played the classic comic’s mistress Carlotta Monti opposite Rod Steiger.
In what would become a signature role, Perrine took on the role of Miss Eve Teschmacher, girlfriend of villain Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman), in the wildly popular Superman (1978) and its sequel Superman II, both starring Christopher Reeve in the title role.
Perrine next played Charlotta Steele, ex-wife of Robert Redford’s rodeo champ in The Electric Horseman (1979).
Perrine’s winning streak hit a wall in 1980 when she appeared in the notorious Village People flop Can’t Stop the Music, a performance that earned her a Razzie Award nomination. “It ruined my career,” she later said. “I moved to Europe after, I was so embarrassed.”
If Can’t Stop The Music stalled Perrine’s appearances in top-line projects (as it did with anyone else associated with it), she nonetheless continued working. Subsequent credits included The Border with Jack Nicholson and the short-lived CBS sitcom Leo & Liz in Beverly Hills with Harvey Korman. In 2000 she had a small role in the Mel Gibson film What Women Want.
On television, Perrine appeared in a 1995 episode of Homicide: Life on the Street as the ex-wife of Richard Belzer’s Detective John Munch. Other TV credits include appearances on Northern Exposure, ER, Nash Bridges, The Practice, Just Shoot Me! and Third Watch, among others.
In 2020, Perrine’s friend Souther directed a 36-minute documentary, title Valerie, that chronicled Perrine’s carrer and battle with Parkinson’s disease.
She is survived by her brother Kenneth, who also has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s.
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