Compounding this setback, Valerie Perrine turned down Kathleen Turner’s career-making role in Body Heat (1981), but she found more substantial employment in Tony Richardson’s The Border (1982) as the social-climber wife spurring Jack Nicholson’s corrupt border guard on to greater misdeeds. Even the critic Pauline Kael, never a fan, offered praise, albeit in a backhanded way: “Perrine, who has been giving disgraceful performances for several years, plays the dumb-tart wife to whiny perfection.”
Of the actors’ guru Stanislavsky, Valerie Perrine once said “I don’t know anything about Chavanasky [sic] or whatever you call him. I really don’t think about anything until I get on the set.” For her, acting was an enjoyable social activity: she claimed to have dropped LSD 400 times and was renowned for the wild parties she threw at her house in Sherman Oaks. Asked in a 2023 interview with The Hollywood Reporter what made her shindigs so special, Valerie Perrine had a one-word response: “Cocaine.”
Valerie Ritchie Perrine was born in Galveston, Texas, on September 3 1943 to Kenneth Perrine, a lieutenant colonel in the US Army, and his wife Winifred, née McGinley, a former dancer in the provocative Broadway troupe the Earl Carroll Vanities. She spent most of her childhood in Japan, where her father was stationed at the end of the Second World War; aged four, she began performing ceremonial dances to friends of the family (“I wanted to show off”).
In her teens, the family moved to a ranch in Scottsdale, Arizona. Her father, who had adapted poorly to civilian life, began drinking, prompting his daughter to run off to Vegas in the hope of becoming a showgirl: “I was almost 19 when I got there. I had to lie about my age to work… We had fun. But you have to remember being a showgirl is very time-consuming. All you do is work and sleep.”