Angelique Pettyjohn Would Be 80 Today

A celebration today of burlesque dancer and actress Angelique Pettyjohn (Dorothy Lee Perrins, 1943-1992).

Most of Angelique’s screen roles echoed her live performing career as an exotic dancer, though she was cast in mainstream entertainment as well as low-budget exploitation films. She is perhaps most widely remembered for her appearance in the 1968 Star Trek episode “The Gamesters of Triskelion” (above) where she utters the immortal introduction “I am your drill thrall”, making every straight adolescent boy in America, and probably some of the gay ones, want a “drill thrall” of their very own.

Angelique had broken into the business in a big way the previous year, when she appeared in episodes of Batman , The Green Hornet, and Get Smart, and in the films Hotel, The Cool Ones, A Guide for the Married Man, Rough Night in Jericho, and the Elvis musical Clambake, among several others. She’s also in the movies The Odd Couple, Where Were You When the Lights Went Out?, For Singles Only, The Mad Doctor of Blood Island (all 1968), Don Knotts‘ The Love God?, Childish Things, Heaven with a Gun (all 1969), Tell Me That You Love Me Junie Moon and Up Your Teddy Bear (both 1970). During these same years she was also appearing under the radar (and sometimes under her co-stars in) such things as Doctor Lust, The Touch of Her Flesh, The Love Rebellion, Hell’s Belles, Cargo of Love and The Curious Female.

At this stage, Angelique moved to Las Vegas to take higher paying live performance gigs in burlesque revues at such venues as the Silver Slipper, the Aladdin Hotel, the Maxim Hotel, and the Joker Club. At the end of the decade she was featured in the “Girls of Las Vegas” photo spread in Playboy. She then returned to films as a bit player. You can see her in Going in Style (1979), Dick Shawn’s Goodbye Cruel World (1983), and Alex Cox’s Repo Man (1984). She played bigger roles in sci fi things like The Lost Empire (1984), Biohazard (1985), and The Wizard of Speed and Time (1988), and sexploitation like Titillation (1982), Stalag 69 (1982), and Takin’ it Off (1985).

An L.A. native, she was taken prematurely by cervical cancer at age 48.