Asked in 1975 whether it bothered her that she was frequently called upon to be “sexy”, the actor Valerie Perrine said: “It’s not something I mind like being bitten by a mosquito.” On the contrary, she often revelled in it, considering herself “the 1970s version of Mae West”.

Perrine, who has died aged 82 after suffering from Parkinson’s disease, was blissfully unselfconscious, entirely untrained and claimed never even to have read a script before making her screen debut as the porn star Montana Wildhack, who is abducted by aliens in the 1972 film of Kurt Vonnegut’s book Slaughterhouse-Five. “There’s nothing so mysterious about acting,” said Perrine. “You’re either good at it or you’re not. I happen to be good at it.”

Despite the emphasis on sexuality and nudity in her early roles, such as the television play Steambath (1973), she was too witty and skilful a performer to be mistaken for eye candy. She received an Oscar nomination, as well as the Cannes film festival’s best actress prize, for her impressively raw work in Lenny (also 1974) as the stripper Honey, wife of the provocative stand-up Lenny Bruce (Dustin Hoffman), who must navigate her husband’s whims and demands while dealing with her own emotional tumult. The film’s director, Bob Fosse, told her she was “the best actress I’ve ever worked with”.

In the blockbuster Superman (1978), Perrine, whose surname rhymed with “divine”, was exactly that as Eve Teschmacher, sparky moll to the arch-villain Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman), who continually patronises and underestimates her. She eventually comes to the rescue of Superman when he is drowning after Luthor has hung a chunk of Kryptonite around his neck. Eve sneaks a kiss on the wilted superhero’s lips before saving him, then asks plaintively: “Why is it I can’t get it on with the good guys?” Not having learned her lesson, she helps Luthor break out of prison in Superman II (1981).

Perrine played the ex-wife of a rodeo rider (Robert Redford) in The Electric Horseman (1979), but considered her prospects ruined after appearing in the notorious flop Can’t Stop the Music (1980), an oddly straitlaced showcase for the gay-coded pop group Village People. She played a retired model who is shown in the opening credits doodling a moustache on one of her own advertising campaigns on the side of a bus.

Such irreverence was in the spirit of the real Perrine, whose attitude to fame was epitomised by her personalised number plate, which read “RATS 1”– “STAR” spelt backwards.

Born in Galveston, Texas, to Winifred (nee McGinley), a dancer, and Kenneth, a lieutenant colonel in the US army, she was raised partly in Japan, where her father was stationed. The family later settled in Arizona.

She was educated at Camelback high school in Phoenix. At 17, she dropped out of the University of Arizona in Tucson and found work as a dancer in the Lido de Paris revue at the Stardust Hotel in Las Vegas. “I couldn’t see any point in sitting around in classrooms taking a lot of dumb courses which wouldn’t do me any good. It was much easier being paid for showing off my body.” While mid-dance, she would “worry about what I’d cook for dinner … The thing that kills you is the boredom.”

She objected to being referred to as a topless dancer. “Oh, I came out with my boobs out, but I was also wearing $2,000 worth of feathers and beads. I even had a $5,000 costume once. There was no shaking involved. It was just a woman walking around very elegantly.” She was highly paid, and spent much of her money on drugs. She claimed to have taken LSD 400 times and to have “experimented with almost every drug known to man”.

She would have stayed longer in Vegas, she said, were it not for the death of her partner, the firearms importer Bill Haarman, who accidentally shot himself a month before they were due to marry. Another boyfriend, the hair stylist Jay Sebring, was one of the victims of the Manson family killings in which the actor Sharon Tate also died. Perrine, who was meant to be in attendance with him that night, had to cry off at the last minute when the colleague who was covering her shift in Vegas fell ill.

After travelling around Europe for a year, she went to California. While living on unemployment benefits and food stamps, she met an agent who arranged to take publicity photographs. He introduced her to the director George Roy Hill, who was preparing to make Slaughterhouse-Five.

Her next role was in the stock-car racing drama The Last American Hero (1973) as Marge, an irrepressible racetrack groupie. Informed by the star driver, played by Jeff Bridges, that she is “nice”, she says with a grin: “I’m not nice, I’m perfect.”

She played WC Fields’s mistress, Carlotta Monti, in WC Fields and Me (1976), but found her co-star Rod Steiger unpleasant to work with. “I don’t know how someone playing WC Fields could be totally without humour,” she said. “You can tell it was an unhappy film. Only four people came to the end-of-shooting cast party.”

Though she was correct to say that her career was hurt by Can’t Stop the Music, and not helped when she declined the role that made a star of Kathleen Turner in the 1981 noir Body Heat, she still continued to work. She played the materialistic wife to Jack Nicholson’s troubled immigration agent in Tony Richardson’s thriller The Border (1982), and lent her joie de vivre to the comedy Water (1985), set on a fictional Caribbean island and starring Michael Caine, Billy Connolly and Leonard Rossiter.

Later roles included the Wesley Snipes action vehicle Boiling Point (1993) and a cameo in What Women Want (2000), starring Mel Gibson. Her final film was Silver Skies (2016), a comedy about retirees in an apartment complex, of which the Hollywood Reporter said: “Nobody walks away looking good.”

A short documentary, Valerie (2019), showed Perrine in the grip of Parkinson’s and included footage of her in the immediate aftermath of surgery. It also featured testimony from friends such as her Silver Skies co-star George Hamilton, who said of her: “Those eyes are dangerous. You could drown in them.”

Perrine tended to shrug off such atmospheric descriptions, expressing instead a straightforward preference for the down-to-earth. “It’s much more fun to be trashy,” she said.

She is survived by a brother, Kenneth.

• Valerie Perrine, actor, born 3 September 1943; died 23 March 2026