Actress Mary Louise Weller, known for her role as sorority sister Mandy Pepperidge in Animal House, died Thursday after a brief illness, her longtime partner Michael Roy Curtis announced.
Weller was 79. She would have turned 80 on Friday.
Born in New York City in 1946, Weller was raised in Los Angeles and grew up around Hollywood. Her aunt, who headed a magazine company, would bring “fabulous, drunken, singing and dancing stars” to the house, she told the blog Cult Film Freak in a 2012 interview. White Christmas actor Danny Kaye was also a close family friend and early inspiration.
“I flew out of the womb in full camera makeup and screaming ‘HAIR... MAKEUP’!” Weller said.
As a teenager, Weller also trained as an equestrian.
In the 1978 comedy Animal House, directed by John Landis, Weller played the prim Pi House sister Mandy Pepperidge.
The film’s epilogue reveals that Mandy later marries John Belushi’s character, future U.S. senator John “Bluto” Blutarsky.
“I’m pretty sure all of us knew that the movie would be a huge hit. The script was simply brilliant,” Weller told Cult Film Freak. “I remember showing it to Brandon Stoddard, who was head of ABC at that time. He also knew it would be an enormous hit, but he warned me that it would be the movie I would always be known for.”
Weller’s filmography also included an uncredited part as a party guest in Serpico, a supporting role as a Southern intern at a New York fashion magazine in a 1979 adaptation of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and an appearance as Chuck Norris’ love interest in the action film Forced Vengeance.
On TV, Weller’s appeared in TV shows such as Baretta, Kojak, and Starsky & Hutch.
Her final on-screen credit was as a doctor in the mystery medical drama Quincy, M.E. in 1983.
Weller is survived by her cousin, author Sheila Weller.
