Valerie Perrine's best screen moment is a woman telling the plain truth into a tape recorder, and she did it with no training at all. Hollywood mostly asked her for showgirls instead, and she gave them, cheerfully, for the next forty years.
Fi1m perspective
The scene we keep coming back to is in Lenny (1974). Honey Bruce, widow of the comic, sits in close-up with her hair pulled back and tells a tape recorder what the marriage was: the drugs, what she did, what she let him do. Bob Fosse shoots the film as an inquest, and everyone else in it is giving evidence for the defence. Perrine is not. It moved us more than anything Dustin Hoffman does at the microphone, and he is doing a great deal, because she is the one person in the film who is not being turned into a cause.
Nothing in her past said she could do it. She came to films from the Lido de Paris revue at the Stardust in Las Vegas, where she had been a showgirl from around 1968, and was cast in her debut, as Montana Wildhack in Slaughterhouse-Five (1972), after being noticed at a dinner party. She never trained. "I really don’t think about anything until I get on the set," she said, and on the evidence of Lenny that was not a boast but a method. The courtship scenes, where Honey is a stripper and Lenny a comic and each is working the other, need an actor who knows what a hustle looks like from the inside. Perrine did.
The industry took the showgirl and not the widow. She played Eve Teschmacher, Lex Luthor's secretary, in Superman (1978) and again in Superman II (1980), opposite Gene Hackman's Luthor, and Charlotta Steele in The Electric Horseman (1979) with Robert Redford. We will not judge those films here beyond saying that the parts she was offered ran to a type: sexy or scatterbrained, heart of gold, the woman standing beside the men while they do the plot. The same year as the second Superman she appeared in Can't Stop the Music, and her run as a leading name did not survive it. The supporting roles that followed, in film and television, ran on through the 2000s and stopped around 2016.
It is a small body of work to judge from, and one film carries most of it. That is not nothing. Plenty of actors with years of training never manage a scene as plain and as unprotected as Perrine's interviews in Lenny, and the film would be a lesser thing without her. Watch it for Hoffman, as most people do, and then watch her face in the moments when he is not on screen. Fosse asked her for the truth once and got it. The rest of Hollywood mostly asked for the showgirl.
Biography
Valerie Perrine was an American actress. Born Valerie Ritchie Perrine on 3 September 1943 in Galveston, Texas, she died on 23 March 2026 in Beverly Hills, California.
She began her career as a Las Vegas showgirl and made her screen debut in Slaughterhouse-Five (1972). Perrine played Honey Bruce in Lenny (1974), for which she won the BAFTA Award for Most Promising Newcomer to Leading Film Roles and the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress, and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.
She appeared as Eve Teschmacher in Superman (1978) and Superman II (1980), and had roles in films including The Electric Horseman (1979) and later television series such as ER.
