Animal House actress Mary Louise Weller dies aged 79

Left · 2Mary Louise Weller, who played Pi House sorority sister Mandy Pepperidge in the 1978 comedy Animal House, died Thursday at the age of 79. 1 2 Left · 2Her longtime partner, Michael Roy Curtis, announced her death; The Hollywood Reporter describes her illness as brief, while Variety calls it long. 1 2 Left · 2Weller was born in New York on Oct. 2, 1946, and raised in Westwood, California; the actor Danny Kaye was her godfather and a friend of her father, a doctor. 1 2

Left · 2As a teenager she trained with the U.S. Equestrian Team, and she was a former Ford model and longtime spokesperson for Jean Naté fragrance. 1 2 Left · 2Her early screen work included an uncredited party-scene appearance in Serpico (1973), according to The Hollywood Reporter; Variety instead says she made her film debut in the 1972 political comedy Hail!. 1 2 Left · 1In Animal House, directed by John Landis, she played the snooty Mandy, girlfriend of Omega House chapter president Gregory Marmalard, and the object of John Belushi's Bluto's affection; the film's epilogue says Mandy and Bluto marry and live in Washington, D.C., with him in the Senate. 1

Left · 2In 1978 she also appeared in the TV film Hunters of the Reef and the horror movie The Evil. 1 2 Left · 2Later film roles included Larry Peerce's adaptation of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1979), Forced Vengeance (1982), in which she was Chuck Norris's character's love interest, and Q (1982); Variety also lists Once Upon a Spy and Blood Tide. 1 2 Left · 2On television she appeared in Baretta, Kojak, Starsky & Hutch and CHiPs, among others, and her final on-screen credit was a 1983 episode of Quincy, M.E. 1 2

Left · 2She acted on stage in New York and wrote the play Four Alone, staged at the Greenhouse Theater in Pasadena; The Hollywood Reporter adds it was funded by a National Endowment for the Arts grant and that she later left show business. 1 2 Left · 1Looking back in a 1986 Los Angeles Times interview, she described her typical roles as "the beautiful girl in trouble or the rich guy’s daughter who owns a Porsche." 1 Left · 2Asked in 2012 whether she knew Animal House would be a hit, she said she was pretty sure it would be, recalling that then-ABC head Brandon Stoddard told her it would be the movie she would always be known for. 1 2

Left · 2She is survived by her cousin Sheila Weller, an author whose books include the 2003 family memoir Dancing at Ciro’s and Girls Like Us (2008). 1 2