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Jeramie Dreyfuss: The MrSkin.com Interview
Jeramie Dreyfuss has declared that she hopes her kids won't see a wink of certain footage from her flash-in-the-pan acting career. Well, that won't last. Under the name Jeramie Rain, the former Mrs. Richard Dreyfuss electrified exploitation screen as a bisexual in Wes Craven's horror landmark Last House on the Left (Picture: 1) and opposite Cheri Caffaro in Don Schain's New Jersey masterpiece-of-ass The Abductors (Picture: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4). With appearances in cult sensations such as those, it'll be tough for Jeramie to keep her body (of work) permanently under wraps.

Calling Mr. Skin from her beloved home in Idaho, Jeramie was gracious and funny and not at all like her most famous movie characters--except in her still-vibrant sex appeal.

So what have you been up to since you retired from acting?
Well, you know, I had three children with Richard Dreyfuss, and I'm just sort of spending my time raising them.

I also heard that you've had some health issues.
I've had lupus for years. It's an autoimmune disease that's quite common and unfortunately incurable. Your body is basically allergic to itself. It's painful and scary, but I'm doing well. I plan to not die from it. They diagnosed me when I was twenty-eight, and the life expectancy back then was three years. And I'm still here in my fifties. And I'm great. I have a great life. I can't complain about anything. I love to go hiking here and walk my dog and love to live in Idaho.

Is Idaho the new hot spot?
Steven Spielberg is building a house here. Tom Hanks lives here. It's a lot like Aspen, which is kind of the scary part.

So if you see your ex's high-profile pals such as Tom Hanks or Spielberg in town at the grocery store, will it be awkward?
It'd be really weird to see Steven because he and Amy Irving [his first wife] used to be our best friends. Amy won me in the divorce, so I still talk to and see a lot of her. I do hope to be friends again with Steven when he moves here. It would be weird to live in the same town with him and not be.

So let's talk about your acting career.
Oh boy. I hope my children would never even hear about The Abductors. I looked cute in it, though, with that Jane FondaKlute-type haircut and all.

How did you like working on The Abductors?
I wasn't too happy with it because I didn't know I was supposed to do a nude scene.

Like in the scene where the three of you have to strip one next to another?
Exactly. I was like twenty-one years old; we're shooting out in New Jersey, and the next thing I know they made us take our clothes off. I was just mortified. I remember the one time I saw the film I could tell I was just dying of embarrassment.

Did the other girls on the set of The Abductors have any problems disrobing?
There was this one girl named Charlie. She was a wild one. I think she was into some pretty rough stuff. She must have used a stage name because her real name isn't in the credits. She was blonde, not Cheri Caffaro though. She had a bigger part and wasn't one of the cheerleaders, I remember that much. She was sort of a fairly well-known prostitute in New York at the time, and I always wondered what happened to her.

Do you remember what you were paid for that part?
Oh, probably nothing. I got paid $600 to do Last House and that was for six weeks worth of work. They didn't pay us much back then.

Are you a little bitter over the financial aspects of Last House?
Oh, I wouldn't use the word bitter. [It's just that] back then the producer, Sean Cunningham, said that if we did his movie--and he said this to all of us--that he would take all of us on to bigger and better things. They took none of us on to anything. And you know they made a lot of money off Last House. They still make a lot of money off Last House.

What's another aspect of Last House that we might not know about?
It almost got me fired off [NBC soap opera] The Doctors at that time. They didn't care about The Abductors. They just didn't want me being the lesbian in Last House. And I made Richard promise he would never see Last House on the Left. One day my children found a copy of it and put it on and they were like, "Dad, come watch Mom." He said, "No, no, I promised your mother I wouldn't watch the stupid thing."

How did you get hooked up with Last House in the first place?
Fred J. Lincoln, who played Weasel Podowski in Last House, was a big porno star at the time, and he worked at an answering service. He was the one who got me both of these films.

And you didn't wonder about what kind of movie a porno star might be sending you off to?
I didn't know what I was thinking. I didn't think of Fred as a porno star because he was such a close friend. We did this big thing for Last House in Jersey last year. They got the whole cast together.

How long were you on The Doctors?
For about eight years. I moved to L.A. and did General Hospital a couple times, but then I started working as a producer. I was so happy working behind the scenes and was living with John Savage the actor at the time. He kept getting into trouble on the set of his movies, and the studio would hire me to babysit him. That was interfering with my career, so I quit my job with NBC to watch over him.

A movie-star babysitter?
Oh yeah. Once, Diane Lane's father asked me if I would babysit her. This was when she was fourteen. I had to call him in New York the next day and say I love your daughter but can't possibly. I mean, my God, she was dating the president's son, Steven Ford, at the time. I just couldn't take care of her. I mean I love Diane, but she was a very advanced fourteen-year-old.

Would you ever consider appearing in a Last House sequel?
I think they should bring all of us back for another one. Like one where they're not quite dead but have scars all over them. I think they should live in, like, a nursing home up in Michigan or something. I'll have this huge scar across my neck, and all of us are damaged, like half-dead. Just these really weird people running this nursing home quietly, or it wouldn't even have to be a nursing home, it could be a camp. Maybe people would bring in their children for us to watch over, and, you know, when the moon is full we start to get a little weird.



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