Valerie Perrine, who won the Best Actress prize at Cannes in 1975, earned an Academy Award nomination for the same performance, and then cheerfully signed on to play Lex Luthor's girlfriend in the most expensive comic-book movie ever made, died on Sunday at her home in Beverly Hills. She was 82. Her friend Stacey Souther confirmed that Perrine died peacefully after more than a decade living with Parkinson's disease. [1]

The career, like the woman, resisted easy categorization. Perrine was a Las Vegas showgirl before she was an actress, dancing at the Desert Inn and the Lido de Paris before anyone thought to put her in front of a camera. When they did, the results were immediate and startling. Her first significant role, as Montana Wildhack in George Roy Hill's adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (1972), required her to be simultaneously ethereal and carnal — a combination that Vonnegut himself, not known for praising adaptations of his work, conceded she managed. [2]

Then came Lenny. Bob Fosse's 1974 biography of Lenny Bruce cast Perrine as Honey Harlow, Bruce's stripper wife, and the role demanded everything a performer could give: comedy, grief, addiction, rage, tenderness. The Cannes jury gave her their top acting prize. The Academy nominated her for Best Actress. She lost to Ellen Burstyn in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, which is the kind of sentence that tells you how seriously the industry took her in that moment — she was competitive against the best of her generation. [3]

What followed was the choice that defined her public image, if not her talent. Richard Donner cast her as Miss Teschmacher in Superman (1978), Lex Luthor's good-hearted moll who turns on her boss to save Hackensack, New Jersey, from a nuclear warhead. The role was comic, warm, and almost entirely reactive — Perrine spent most of her scenes reacting to Gene Hackman's megalomania and Christopher Reeve's earnestness. She made both men funnier. Her timing was impeccable, her screen presence effortless, and if the role was smaller than what Cannes had recognized, she played it as though she had nothing to prove. She returned for Superman II in 1980. [4]

The rest of the career was uneven, as careers often are when Hollywood cannot decide whether an actress is an art-house asset or a populist entertainer. She appeared in The Border (1982) with Jack Nicholson, Water (1985) with Michael Caine, and various television guest spots through the 1990s. None of it matched Lenny or Superman, but the work was steady and the performances were professional. She did not disappear; she simply stopped being offered material worthy of what Cannes had seen.

Parkinson's disease was diagnosed in 2015 — publicly disclosed in 2023 — and gradually ended her ability to work. Souther, who organized her care in the final years, said Perrine faced the illness with the same directness she brought to performing. "She was brave in a way that wasn't about making a show of it," Souther said.

She was born on September 3, 1943, in Galveston, Texas, to a military family that moved frequently. She grew up on bases, landed in Las Vegas as a young woman, and left for Hollywood when Hollywood came looking. She is survived by her brother Kenneth, who has also been diagnosed with Parkinson's. [5]

The generation of actresses who worked in the 1970s — Burstyn, Dunaway, Rowlands, Keaton — are often discussed as a cohort who forced American cinema to take women seriously. Perrine belonged to that group but stood slightly apart from it, in part because she never seemed to be forcing anything. The Cannes jury saw a great actress. The Superman audience saw a delightful screen presence. They were looking at the same person.

-- CHARLES ASHFORD, London