Valerie Perrine died on Sunday at her home in Beverly Hills. She was 82 years old and had lived with Parkinson's disease for fifteen years. By Tuesday, her friends had set up a GoFundMe to pay for the funeral. [1]

The campaign was organized by Stacey Souther, a longtime caretaker and friend, who wrote that Perrine's medical expenses over the past decade had exhausted her savings. The goal was modest — enough to cover burial costs and a small memorial. Within hours, the entertainment industry that had not called in years began sharing the link. By Wednesday morning, the fund had exceeded its target, driven largely by strangers who remembered a woman most of them had last seen on screen in 1978. [2]

That was the year Perrine played Eve Teschmacher in Richard Donner's Superman, the role that became her public identity whether she wanted it or not. She was the woman who kissed Christopher Reeve and then betrayed Gene Hackman. "Miss Teschmacher!" became a catchphrase. James Gunn, who directed the Superman franchise's recent reboot, posted simply: "Rest in Peace to the original Eve Teschmacher, Valerie Perrine."

But Perrine was an actress before she was a franchise. Her first role came from a chance encounter — an agent spotted her at a dinner party in the early 1970s and asked if she had ever considered film. She had not. Within three years she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Lenny, Bob Fosse's 1974 biographical film about comedian Lenny Bruce. She won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival for the same role. She was 31.

The career that followed was solid but not spectacular — the kind that Hollywood generates in volume and then discards. Roles in The Electric Horseman, Can't Stop the Music, and Superman II. Television guest spots. Smaller films that paid less. The work slowed in the 1990s and stopped entirely when the Parkinson's diagnosis arrived in 2011.

Her brother also has Parkinson's. The disease ran in the family like a second inheritance, this one with no residuals.

Ben Mankiewicz of Turner Classic Movies captured the structural point: "Valerie Perrine died today after a long struggle w/ Parkinson's. She was a fine actor — and an interesting one. Valerie, like almost every actor, wasn't rich." The observation is not sentimental. It is arithmetic. The entertainment industry produces vast wealth. Almost none of it reaches the people who appear on screen for a decade and then disappear.

Perrine's death is not a tragedy of neglect. It is a system functioning as designed. The GoFundMe is how the system processes its remainders.

-- Lucia Vega, Sao Paulo