Mary Louise Weller Dies: ‘Animal House’ Star Was 79

Mary Louise Weller, an actor whose decade-long screen career included a memorable part in the 1978 comedy film National Lampoon’s Animal House, has died. She was 79.

Weller died on Thursday, October 1 — one day before her 80th birthday — following a brief illness, according to Deadline.

In Animal House, Weller played Mandy Pepperidge, an Alpha Delta Pi sorority member who’s dating Omega Theta Pi president Greg Marmalard (James Daughton) but having an affair with Eric “Otter” Stratton (Tim Matheson), a member of the rival frat Delta Tau Chi. But Mandy ends up with John “Bluto” Blutarsky (John Belushi) of the Delta house; the film’s epilogue reveals Mandy and Pluto ultimately get married.

“I’m pretty sure all of us knew that [Animal House] would be a huge hit. The script was simply brilliant,” she told Cult Film Freak in 2012. “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 screen career started in 1972 with a role in the political comedy Hail!, followed by an uncredited part the following year in the Al Pacino cop drama Serpico. Her other film credits included The Evil (1978), The Bell Jar (1979), Forced Vengeance (1982, pictured below), and Bloodtide (also 1982).

On television, Weller had guest-starring roles in more than a dozen shows, including Baretta, Kojak, and Starsky & Hutch. She guest-starred on Fantasy Island and CHiPs, in which she played two characters apiece. She also starred opposite Ted Danson in the 1980 television film Once Upon a Spy. Her last screen credit came in 1983 with a guest-starring part on Quincy, M.E.

By the time of a 1986 Los Angeles Times interview, Weller was living and keeping horses in Malibu, California, having trained with the U.S. Equestrian Team when she was a teenager. “Maybe I got into acting to pay for the horses,” she said. “I made a lot of money and didn’t spend it. Now I’m sitting on three acres it bought in Malibu.”

Reflecting on her film and TV roles, she told the Times, “I was the beautiful girl in trouble or the rich guy’s daughter who owns a Porsche and won’t give you the time of day.”

She also explained to the Times that she had gotten a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to perform a play she had written, titled Four Alone, at the Greenhouse Theater in Pasadena, California. She was also hoping to produce and possibly star in a film she wrote, based on the life of jockey Mary Bacon.

Weller was born in New York on October 2, 1946, and actor Danny Kaye, a friend of her parents, was her godfather, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Her survivors include Michael Roy Curtis, her longtime partner and a designer of equestrian courses, and Sheila Weller, her cousin and a nonfiction author.