Actor and star of Beverley Hills, 90210
Born: October 11, 1966;
Died: March 4, 2019
LUKE Perry, who has died following a stroke aged 52, was a heartthrob for a generation of young women in the 1990s as the “bad boy” star of the hit American teen drama series Beverley Hills, 90210.
With his angst and brushed back hair, Perry was often compared to the ill-fated 1950s film star and iconic rebel figure James Dean. His character Dylan McKay was supposedly a teenager, though Perry was 24 when Beverly Hills, 90210 started. He left school at the end of season three.
The show, simply referred to as 90210 by fans, ran for ten seasons, though Perry had a break from it in the middle of the run. The title came from a Beverley Hills zip code.
The characters woke up to Californian sunshine every morning, lived in mansions, drove Porsches and the like and looked more like models than school kids. Presenting a lifestyle that most teenagers could only fantasise about, 90210 marked a dramatic move away from blue-collar settings towards a more affluent milieu, mirrored in films from Clueless (1995) to Mean Girls (2004).
“It’s pretty easy to draw a direct line between the 90s hysteria over 90210 and the current international obsession with the Kardashians,” wrote commentator Hadley Freeman in The Guardian. “90210 taught teenagers how to lust after American mega-wealth.”
At the height of his success in 90210, Perry also played the title character’s partner in the original 1992 film of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But like most actors who score a major hit in a juvenile role, Perry never quite managed to replicate that level of success in adult parts.
Unlike many however, Perry did continue getting regular work in television. He sported an eyepatch and beard in a 2009 American TV remake of the 1947 John Wayne western Angel and the Badman and by 2017 he had graduated to the role of teen heartthrob’s dad in the series Riverdale, which is available on Netflix in the UK.
Luke Perry started life as Coy Luther Perry III in 1966 in Mansfield, Ohio. His father was a violent alcoholic, who beat up his mother. “Had I been big enough at the time, I would have beat his ass,” Perry told Vanity Fair in a candid interview in 1992. “But I wasn’t. So I always felt that I should have been able to protect her better, but I was a six-year-old kid."
His character in 90210 also struggled with substance abuse and with relationships. “I try to reiterate to these people writing the show that these kids ain’t stupid. They see. They know … I knew what was happening as much as they tried to shelter me from it.”
Perry’s parents divorced when he was very young and he grew up largely with his mother and her new husband. At the end of his schooling, Perry pursued his ambition of an acting career and secured short-term roles in a couple of soap operas in the late 1980s.
But he also took jobs on building sites in between acting gigs and he was working as a labourer on road construction when in 1990 he landed the role of Dylan McKay in 90210, alongside fellow heartthrob Jason Priestley and Shannon Doherty. He would go on to appear in around 200 episodes.
He left in 1995 at the end of a convoluted storyline in which McKay was seeking revenge against the mobster who killed his father (probably), but fell in love and married the mobster’s daughter and then went to pieces after his disapproving father-in-law commissioned a hitman to kill McKay only for the hitman to kill the mobster’s daughter, McKay’s wife, by mistake.
Perry returned for a second stint from 1998 to 2000 and even directed a couple of episodes. During his break from 90210 he appeared in the sci-fi film The Fifth Element (1997) with Bruce Willis, but his film career never really took off.
After 90210, he worked mainly in television, with the occasional film and stage appearance – he played the Billy Crystal role in a London West End stage version of When Harry Met Sally in 2004. More recently he completed filming on Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which is currently being edited.
He married actress Rachel Sharp in 1993. The marriage lasted ten years and he is survived by their two children. His son is a professional wrestler who works under the name Jungle Boy Nate Coy. Perry was engaged at the time of his death.
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