Luke Perrydied Monday at the age of 52, fives days after suffering a massive stroke. As friends, family, fans and costars grieve, take a look back atPEOPLE’s 1991 cover interviewwith the star, when he was a young actor skyrocketed to fame thanks toBeverly Hills, 90210.
Call Luke Perry a teen idol and you’ll get a cannon-shot response. “Man, I hate those two [bleep]ing words!” says Perry, with more than actorly passion. Hey, man, okay.
ABC Photo Archives/ABC/Getty
Good, now we’re on smoother ground.
It seems that last spring, while shooting a scene from the Fox network’s hit seriesBeverly Hills, 90210in the parking lot of Torrance (Calif.) High School, Perry pointed proudly to the pavement and told producer Paul Waigner, “See that speed bump? I made it.”
Sitting with his shirt off on the sunny patio of his leased two-bedroom Hollywood home (sorry, he always keeps his shirt on for photos), Perry grins. “S—, I was laying asphalt the week before I gotBeverly Hills, 90210. I’ll do whatever it takes to pay the rent.”
To explain what he is about, he reflects on the days when “nobody was putting makeup on my face,” in the rural farming town of Fredericktown, Ohio (pop. 2,300), an hour’s drive from Columbus. “I love where I come from,” says Luke, who was christened Coy Luther Perry III. “The people there are good people. When they say, ‘Thank you,’ they mean it. A lot of people say nice things to me out here because they’re getting paid to.”
His father, Coy Sr., a steelworker, and his mother, Ann, a homemaker, divorced when Luke was 6 (he has a brother, Tom, 26, a Navy recruiter in Round Lake, Ill., and a sister, Amy, 21, a secretary). Luke regards the split as fortuitous. His relationship with his dad, in a word, “sucked. I used to be very bitter about it, but I’m not now. It’s not worth my time.” Luke refuses to elaborate on their problems, except to say, “I don’t like anybody who hurts my mom.” Tom, whose potential recruits now beg him for his little brother’s address, will add only, “There was definitely a clash of personalities.” Luke attended the funeral after Coy Sr. died of a heart attack in 1980 but says he and his father never reconciled.
When Luke was 12, his mother married construction worker Steve Bennett, who had a daughter from a previous marriage, Emily, now 15 and a student at Fredericktown High School, from which Luke graduated in 1984. Steve, says Luke, is “the greatest man I know. I love him. I wish he was my real father. He’s the one who taught me the important things I needed to know about being a man.” Says Luke’s mother: “Steve used to take Luke and his brother to work with him on weekends, and they learned a lot about the construction business. They learned what it really was to put in a hard day’s physical labor.”
One time, Luke, who was in the business vocational program, was able to apply his daydreams to his studies. According to his junior high math teacher, Don Falk, when the class was studying percentages, “Luke informed us he wanted to be an actor. I informed him of the 10-percent agent’s fee, and from there we developed a lesson on percents and how much he would pay the agent when he became successful. I then, of course, offered to be his agent when he became a success.”
Falk never got Luke to sign on the dotted line—and neither did any of Luke’s female admirers. Perry was voted Biggest Flirt his senior year. As brother Tom recalls, he was “awesome with the girls. He was a killer. They’d always be calling him.” Seconds his mom: “If Fredericktown ever had a ladies’ man, it was Luke. It broke our hearts when he had to go off and pursue acting. But it left the phone free.”
Perry owns up to dating “a lot of girls” but won’t drop any names. He’s been spotted with Soleil (Punky Brewster) Moon Frye, 15, and singer Paul Anka’s daughter Amanda, in her early 20s, but says they are strictly friends. “I love women, but I’ve got a time problem,” he says. “It’s that simple.”
He claims he has had only one serious girlfriend: Yasmine Bleeth, who starred on the ABC soapRyan’s Hopewhen Luke was onLoving. (She now appears onOne Life to Live.) They lived together in Manhattan but broke up shortly before he moved back to L.A. Neither will discuss the relationship, but Perry says he now prefers not to get involved with actresses. “Sooner or later,” he reasons, “the relationship is going to become competitive. You’re going to be competing for each other’s time, or somebody’s career is going to be at a spot where the other’s is not.”
Perry’s career has hit a high spot with a freshly inked two-picture deal with Twentieth Century Fox; he hopes to begin filming one of the projects during next spring’s90210hiatus. Meanwhile, he chums around with Priestley and fellow ex-soapie Ian Ziering, who plays Steve Sanders on90210. When the guys are not watching sports or videos, or visiting piano bars, or bungee jumping in Angeles National Forest, Perry hangs with his pet Vietnamese potbellied pig, Jerry Lee. It is the pig who keeps the actor down-to-earth, says Luke’s friend Alexa Fogel, ABC’s director of prime-time casting, who owns one too. “National magazines and Mike Ovitz and god knows who else are calling him,” she says, “and he’s calling me from the set to tell me what kind of cat litter to use for my Pig.”
Luke Perry in 1987.ABC Photo Archives/ABC/Getty
Grabbing an apple from the kitchen, Perry holds it between his teeth, kneels on the porch and pokes the apple at Jerry Lee. The pig starts chewing on the fruit, which Perry finally relinquishes after several tugs. “That’s how we have breakfast every day,” he says, wiping the juice from his face.
The pleasures of porcine companionship are obvious, yet once in a while, Perry fantasizes about taking a human companion on the perfect date. That, to his way of thinking, would mean driving out to the desert and lighting a few explosives. “You’re out there away from everybody in the beauty of the desert,” says Perry, with a faraway look. “And I just love pyrotechnics—that BOOM! So I think it would be great to sit there in the back of the truck, drinking a beer and throwing sticks of dynamite.” Surely there’s a woman out there who has a match?
JEANNIE PARK
MICHAEL ALEXANDER in Los Angeles, BONNIE BELL in Fredericktown, LISA RUSSELL in New York City
In lieu of flowers, the Perry family ask that donations be made toFight Colorectal Cancerand St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital.
source: people.com
