What's Her Story: What a difference an era makes. Had Perrine, with her pneumatic dimensions, button-cute face, and high-pitched lisping voice, come along in the 1950s, she might have been promoted as an MM-type sex symbol. (She did work as a topless showgirl in Las Vegas.) But emerging in the early 1970s with some post-counterculture appeal on her side, Perrine made an impressive screen debut slyly parodying sex-bomb types, as porn queen Montana Wildhack, the object of hero Billy Pilgrim's fantasies, in the film adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's time- tripping satire Slaughterhouse-Five (1972). Subsequent films revealed her to be a sensitive actress who always tried to reveal the person behind the erotic appeal; she won Best Actress honors at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for her frank, accomplished performance as comedian Lenny Bruce's stripper wife in 1974's Lenny She had good parts in a handful of other films including W. C. Fields and Me (1976, in half the title role, as Fields' lover Carlotta Monti) and The Electric Horseman (1979), but in Superman (1978) and its 1980 sequel she succumbed to playing the kind of ditzy bimbo role (as Lex Luthor's buxom companion) she'd managed to avoid earlier in her career. Her nadir was reached in the hideous disco extravaganza Can't Stop the Music (1980). 1982's The Border in which she held her own with Jack Nicholson, was a brief return to form. Recent films, including Maid to Order (1987), Bright Angel and Hit Man (both 1991), have wasted her talents, although she did land a solid part in the 1989 TV remake of Sweet Bird of Youth and a good character role as Dennis Hopper's ex-girlfriend in Boiling Point (1993).