Valerie Perrine, an Oscar-nominated actress who both capitalized on and transcended her bombshell image as a former Playboy Playmate, winning critical acclaim for sassy yet vulnerable performances in 1970s films like “Slaughterhouse-Five” and “Lenny” and a memorable turn in “Superman,” with Christopher Reeve, died on Monday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 82.
Her death was confirmed by her close friend Stacey Souther, who directed a 2019 documentary film about Ms. Perrine. He said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, which was diagnosed in 2015.
Ms. Perrine amassed nearly 70 film and television credits over more than four decades, playing opposite some of the biggest male stars of her day, including Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman and Jack Nicholson.
A former Las Vegas showgirl who posed for Playboy pictorials in 1972 and 1981, she was rarely shy about displaying her sexuality — or her nude body onscreen.
“She looks and sounds like a sensual Betty Boop, with her cherubic blue eyes, button nose and rosebud lips strangely coexisting with a snug-fitting blouse unbuttoned almost to the navel and a lispy way of speaking,” Judy Klemesrud wrote in a 1974 profile in The New York Times. She called Ms. Perrine “one of the first avowed sex kittens to come down the Hollywood Freeway since Raquel Welch.”
Still, Ms. Klemesrud added, “unlike most sex symbols of the past,” Ms. Perrine “has almost always been singled out by the critics for her acting rather than her anatomy.”
Ms. Perrine’s breakout performance came in George Roy Hill’s 1972 film adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s time-hopping 1969 novel, “Slaughterhouse-Five.” She played Montana Wildhack, an adult film star turned intergalactic temptress.
The film, like the book, blends a harrowing antiwar message with postwar suburban satire and science fiction. The protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, finds himself “unstuck in time,” bouncing between periods of his life, including World War II, where he (like the author) was a prisoner of war who survived the devastating Allied firebombing of Dresden, Germany, in 1945.
Pilgrim eventually is swept away by aliens, who also pluck Montana Wildhack to serve as his mate in a breeding experiment light-years from Earth. Time magazine called her performance “charming, sensual and funny.”
She earned further plaudits the next year playing Marge, the racing groupie and love interest of Jeff Bridges’s stock car racer in “The Last American Hero,” based on the life of the bootlegger-turned-NASCAR-star Junior Johnson.
Her critical peak came in 1974 with “Lenny” (1974), Bob Fosse’s film version of Julian Barry’s Broadway play about the boundary-shattering work, legal travails and drug-induced death of the 1960s comedian Lenny Bruce, played by Mr. Hoffman.
Ms. Perrine turned heads as Honey, Bruce’s wife, an exotic dancer wearied by her husband’s turbulent life. Her performance radiated “a certain tarnished sexuality,” the critic Roger Ebert noted, “and she gives us at last a stripper without a heart of gold.”
Mr. Perrine’s performance brought her a best actress award at the Cannes Film Festival and an Academy Award nomination in the same category. (The Oscar went to Ellen Burstyn, for Martin Scorsese’s “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.”)
Despite her accolades, Ms. Perrine was modest about her skills as a thespian. “I’ve never had any acting lessons,” she told Ms. Klemesrud of The Times. “I don’t know anything about Chavanasky” — meaning the acting guru Konstantin Stanislavski — “or whatever you call him.”
“I really don’t know what I do,” she continued. “I don’t think about anything until I get on the set. I just learn my lines, period. Then when I’m on the set, I think of something that has happened to me in the past — like in that crying scene with Dustin in ‘Lenny.’ I thought of an old boyfriend who had hurt me, and that really did it.”
Valerie Jane Perrine was born on Sept. 3, 1943, in Galveston, Texas, one of two children of Kenneth I. Perrine, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, and Winifred (McGinley) Perrine, a onetime dancer in the Earl Carroll Vanities, a Broadway revue in the spirit of the Ziegfeld Follies. (The surname, French in origin, was originally pronounced Purr-REEN, but Ms. Perrine was known by both that pronunciation and Purr-RINE).
An Army brat, she grew up in Texas; Yokohama, Japan, where her father was part of the postwar occupational force; and Arizona.
After graduating from Camelback High School in Phoenix in 1961, Ms. Perrine briefly studied psychology at the University of Arizona in Tucson, but left, she said in a 1980 interview with Australian television, because she was bored with the predictable routines of college life: “I knew what was going to happen the next day.”
At 19, she moved to Las Vegas, where she performed in glittery revues at casinos like the Stardust. After eight years in that gambling mecca, and a stint living in Europe, she resettled in Los Angeles. At first, she had no designs on a screen career.
“Acting wasn’t something I pursued,” she said in an interview last year with the Parkinson’s Europe organization. “I was at a small dinner party where an agent was looking for someone to play the role of Montana Wildhack,” and the agent “saw something in me and thought I would be perfect for the part. That’s how I became an actress.”
While she made her name in edgier fare like “Slaughterhouse-Five” and “Lenny,” Ms. Perrine made a mass-market splash with Richard Donner’s 1978 film “Superman,” starring Mr. Reeve in the title role and Margot Kidder as Lois Lane.
Ms. Perrine turned in a winsome performance in the movie as the villain Lex Luthor’s moll, Eve Teschmacher, who ends up saving not only the Kryptonite-weakened superhero, but also Hackensack, N.J., where Eve’s mother lives, from a missile attack, foiling Luthor’s plot. Two years later, she reprised the role in “Superman II.”
Other prominent roles included the ex-wife of Robert Redford’s over-the-hill rodeo star in Sydney Pollack’s “The Electric Horseman” (1979); the ex-model Svengali in “Can’t Stop the Music,” the infamous Village People bomb (1980); and the vapid, materialistic spouse of Jack Nicholson’s border patrol agent in Tony Richardson’s gritty drama “The Border” (1982).
Later, Ms. Perrine earned laughs in a small but memorable role as a mind-reading female office worker in Nancy Meyers’s 2000 hit comedy “What Women Want,” in which Mel Gibson plays a womanizing adman who is suddenly able to hear women’s internal thoughts — and not always to his liking.
She is survived by her brother, Kenneth. Ms. Perrine — whose fiancé, Bill Haarman, died in 1969 — never married.
Given her sexpot image and many skin-baring roles, Ms. Perrine was asked in a 1980 interview with The Los Angeles Times if she considered herself a feminist and whether she supported the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution.
“I don’t believe in the E.R.A. at all,” she said. “Women aren’t equal, they’re superior.”
Alex Williams is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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