Lainie Miller, who performed a dazzling burlesque number in The Graduate before going on to work as a longtime Hollywood labor advocate, script supervisor, business agent and producer, has died. She was 84.
Miller died Tuesday in her Los Angeles home in Toluca Lake after a battle with metastatic cancer, a family spokesperson told The Hollywood Reporter.
Her husband, the noted character actor Dick Miller — he appeared in lots of Roger Corman and Joe Dante films, among them A Bucket of Blood and Gremlins — died in January 2019 at age 90. They were together for nearly 60 years.
Born Sheila Elaine in Ontario, Canada, in March 1941, she took up dance as a child to recover from polio, which had her in an iron lung from ages 3 to 5.
She trained in contortion and ballet for 13 years — she once performed in Swan Lake at Toronto’s Royal Alexandra, the oldest operating theater in North America — and acted in weekly radio dramas at the CBC until age 12 before moving to Hollywood with a nightclub act when she was 17.
She went on to perform burlesque as a Las Vegas showgirl and as a headliner with Minsky’s Revue, then used her experience to play a stripper in a memorable scene that humiliates Katharine Ross’ Elaine Robinson in Mike Nichols’ The Graduate (1967).
To provide stability for her daughter, Barbara Ann, Miller left acting in 1966 to start a career in nursing, putting her paycheck from the Paramount film toward her studies. “I wanted to start exercising my brains — for a change,” she said. “My tassels were getting tired.”
Miller rose to positions of director of nurses, associate hospital administrator and chief labor negotiator before returning to the film industry in the 1980s as an IATSE 871 script supervisor, working on the 1988-90 syndicated series Freddy’s Nightmares and on the 1996 film Down Periscope, among other projects. She served as business agent for more than a decade as well.
Miller also spent time in various capacities with MPI Pension and Health and IATSE as a labor delegate for three decades. She also co-executive produced the 2009 Little League film The Perfect Game, directed by William Dear and starring Clifton Collins Jr.
Miller met her future husband at Schwab’s Pharmacy in Hollywood, recognizing him at the drugstore counter from Corman’s War of the Satellites (1958). “That guy could put his shoes under my bed anytime,” she said.
In their later years, they enjoyed Latin and swing dancing at Las Hadas in Northridge and traveled the world on cruises when they weren’t signing autographs at fan conventions around the country.
Their story is memorialized in the documentary That Guy Dick Miller (2014), whose premiere at South by Southwest came on her 73rd birthday. “I was his fan before I met him,” she told the Asbury Park Press before a screening, “so I’m living a dream.”
“Fierce, fabulous, passionate, witty and romantic are just some of the words friends and loved ones use to describe Lainie, who often held down the fort with enormous tenacity and chutzpah so her husband could maintain a career as an actor — the quintessential woman-behind-the-man,” her family noted.
Survivors include her granddaughter (and best friend), Autumn; her grandson-in-law, Ceaser; and her beloved dog, Popeye. She was predeceased by her brother, Sheldon, and Barbara Ann.
