Valerie Perrine (Wikipedia)
Valerie Perrine is a retired American actress and model. For her role as Honey Bruce in the 1974 film Lenny, she won the BAFTA Award for Most Promising Newcomer to Leading Film Roles, the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress. Her other film appearances include Superman (1978), The Electric Horseman (1979), and Superman II (1980).
Perrine began her career as a Las Vegas showgirl. She played soft-core pornographyactress Montana Wildhack in Kurt Vonnegut‘s Slaughterhouse-Five (1972). Perrine was photographed nude for a pictorial layout in the May 1972 issue of Playboy, later appearing on the cover in August 1981. She then became the first actress to appear nude on American television by exposing her breasts during the May 4, 1973, PBS broadcast of Bruce Jay Friedman‘s Steambath on Hollywood Television Theater. Only a few PBS stations nationwide carried the program. Later in 1973, she appeared in the episode “When the Girls Came Out to Play” of the romantic anthology television series Love Story (1973).
In 1975, Perrine was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress and the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture Actress (Drama) and won the Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival[3] for her role as comedian Lenny Bruce‘s wife, stripper Honey Bruce, in Bob Fosse‘s Lenny (1974).
She portrayed Carlotta Monti, mistress of W.C. Fields, in the biopic W.C. Fields and Me(1976). She played Miss Eve Teschmacher, moll of criminal mastermind Lex Luthor, in Superman (1978). For this role, she was nominated for the 1979 Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actress. She reprised her role as Miss Teschmacher in Superman II (1980).
Perrine played Charlotta Steele, ex-wife of a rodeo champion played by Robert Redford, in The Electric Horseman (1979). Her career grew uneven after an appearance in Can’t Stop the Music (1980), for which she was nominated for a Razzie Award for Worst Actress. This film has since become a cult classic. In 1982, she played the role of Marcy, the wife of a corrupt police officer, in The Border with Jack Nicholson. In 1986, she starred in the failed CBS comedy series Leo & Liz in Beverly Hillswith Harvey Korman.
In the years since then, Perrine has worked in lower-profile projects, although she did have a small supporting role in the 2000 Mel Gibson film What Women Want. In 1995, Perrine made a guest appearance on the series Homicide: Life on the Street, playing an ex-wife of Richard Belzer‘s character, Detective John Munch.
Perrine was born in Galveston, Texas, the daughter of Winifred “Renee” (née McGinley), a dancer who appeared in Earl Carroll’s Vanities, and Kenneth Perrine, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army. Kenneth Perrine was the grandson of Robert Allen Perrine, a descendant of Staten Island Huguenot Daniel Perrin, and Mary Staats, the latter of Dutch ancestry. Her mother was Scottish (of Irish descent), from Helensburgh in Dunbartonshire.
The times obituary in 2026
If Valerie Perrine’s time as a Las Vegas showgirl and Playboy model meant that she was stereotyped by Hollywood, she made the most of it. From her debut role in 1972 as a soft-porn actress in Slaughterhouse-Five to playing Lex Luther’s seductive moll six years later in Superman, via her role as Honey Harlow, the “stripper with a heart of gold” in Lenny (1974), Perrine capitalised on and transcended her bombshell image, with performances that won her critical acclaim.
In a profile at the time of Lenny, The New York Times called her “one of the first avowed sex kittens to come down the Hollywood Freeway since Raquel Welch” and described her as “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.” If the description today sounds sexist, the writer did at least add that “unlike most sex symbols of the past she has been singled out by the critics for her acting rather than her anatomy”.
Yet when she arrived in Los Angeles after eight years in Vegas, where she was making $800 a week as the lead dancer in the cabaret at the Stardust, she had no designs on becoming an actress. It was only when she found herself sitting next to a Hollywood casting agent at a dinner party that the thought entered her head. When he asked if she had ever acted, she said no. “Then he asked me if I could, and I said yes.
The only photo she had to give him showed her as a topless showgirl and he duly forwarded it to Monique James, the head of new talent at Universal, who invited her to audition for the role of Montana Wildhack in Slaughterhouse-Five, based on Kurt Vonnegut’s sci-fi novel.
“They told me to wear a bikini because they wanted to see what my body looked like,” she recalled. “I didn’t have a bikini so I wore my Vegas costume.” Perrine was offered the part and her new career was up and running
She never took acting classes and claimed that Universal ordered her not to so that her talent should not be “corrupted”. Beyond learning her lines, she did little or no preparation for her roles and believed her success came simply from being natural. “I don’t really know what I do. I don’t think about anything until I get on the set,” she said. “Then when I’m on the set, I think of something that has happened to me in the past
A potent example came when she portrayed Honey, wife of the comedian Lenny Bruce, played by Dustin Hoffman in Bob Fosse’s biopic about the comedian. “In the crying scene with Dustin, I thought of an old boyfriend who had hurt me, and that really did it,” she said.
The film was promoted with the tag line, “Lenny said it. ‘Hot’ Honey did it. Together they shocked America’ and her bravura performance won her Oscar and Golden Globe nominations as best actress and a Bafta as most promising newcomer — beating none other than Robert De Niro in The Godfather Part II.
While making the film Hoffman told her that he hated being mistaken for Al Pacino or De Niro, an unwise revelation that led to him discovering that Perrine could be as playful off the set as she was on it. When an audience of “tourists and retirees passionately in love with Dustin” assembled outside a Miami restaurant where they were shooting a scene on location, she organised the left side of the crowd to shout “Bobby De Niro” and the right side to yell “Al Pacino”. When Hoffman heard them, he threw down his script and yelled, “Where the f*** is Valerie
As Lex Luthor’s assistant and girlfriend Miss Eve Teschmacher in Superman she stole one of the film’s most memorable scenes, showing a poignant tendresse towards Christopher Reeve’s superhero when he was dying from the Kryptonite in which his arch enemy had covered him and enabling him to escape. It was an act so good that she was asked to reprise the role two years later in Superman IIin which she helped Reeve to escape all over again
Until the health issues that beset her final years Perrine continued to work regularly in film and television, playing opposite Robert Redford in Sydney Pollack’s The Electric Horseman (1979) and as the social-climbing wife of Jack Nicholson in Tony Richardson’s The Border (1982). There was also a role in the La Frenais/Clement comedy Water with Michael Caine — “the nicest human being I’ve ever worked with”. Yet she never again touched the heights of the films she made in the 1970s and claimed that her career was “ruined” by starring with the Village People in the disco-themed Can’t Stop the Music (1980), a notorious flop, so bad that it inspired the launch of the Worst Picture Golden Raspberry Awards, popularly known as The Razzies.
Her private life was beset by tragedy. Her fiancé, Bill Haarman, a businessman and gun collector, was killed a month before their planned wedding in 1969 when the pistol he always carried tucked into his waistband fell and discharged in a freak accident. She then began a relationship with the celebrity hairdresser Jay Sebring, who was murdered by Charles Manson’s followers at the home of Sharon Tate. Perrine had been invited to the house that day but work prevented her from being there.
Unabashedly open about her taste for recreational drugs, she claimed to have taken LSD 400 times and the parties she threw at her home in Sherman Oaks were celebrated for their wildness. When The Hollywood Reporter asked what was the secret of her success as a host, she replied “cocaine”.
She never married or had children but there were flings with a number of leading men including Jeff Bridges, with whom she co-starred in The Last American Hero, Elliott Gould and allegedly Mick Jagger and Dodi Fayed.
During her long struggle with Parkinson’s disease she was cared for by Stacey Souther, who also directed a 2019 film about her. “I can’t walk. I can’t write. I can’t talk right,” Perrine said in the documentary and explained she had agreed to make it because she “didn’t want the world to think I’d faded away
Valerie Ritchie Perrine was born in 1943, in Galveston, Texas, the daughter of Renee (née McGinley), a dancer from Scotland, and Kenneth Perrine, a lieutenant colonel in the US Army.
Her childhood was spent wherever the army sent her father around the world — including Japan where he was stationed towards the end of the Second World War — before he retired to Arizona. There Perrine attended high school in Phoenix and briefly studied psychology at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
At 19 she dropped out and headed for Las Vegas. “Mother cried, Daddy swore,” she told People magazine, but she regarded her eight-year stint as a showgirl as better training than drama school could ever have offered.
Valerie Perrine, actress, was born on September 3, 1943. She died of complications from Parkinson’s disease on March 23, 2026, aged 82