Overview
Valerie Ritchie Perrine (born September 3, 1943) is an American actress. 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).
Early life
Perrine was born in Galveston, Texas, as the daughter of Winifred "Renee" (nee McGinley), a dancer who appeared in Earl Carroll's Vanities, and Kenneth I. Perrine, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army. Kenneth I. Perrine was the grandson of Alfred Perrine of Wallkill, N.Y., a descendant of Staten Island Huguenot Daniel Perrin. The Perrine family dates its ancestry to the French family of Perrin, which intermarried with other Normans dating back to William the Conqueror in 1066. Her mother was Scottish (of Irish descent), from Helensburgh in Dunbartonshire.
Owing to her father's career, Perrine lived in many locations as the family moved to different posts.
Career
She played soft-core pornography actress Montana Wildhack in the film adaptation of 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).
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