Although Perkins made an inauspicious film debut in the 1986 romantic comedy About Last Night, the film proved prophetic. In it, she was relegated to the part of wisecracking best buddy, an archetype she would often embody throughout her career. While her turn as a yuppie in love with a boy trapped in a man's body in the 1988 smash Big seemed to signal her breakthrough, few of Perkins' subsequent projects allowed her to live up to that promise. Trained at Chicago's Goodman School of Drama and a member of the prestigious Steppenwolf Theater (as well as the ex-wife of its founder, Terry Kinney), Perkins had an impressive stage pedigree when she ventured into movies. But Hollywood never seemed to know what to do with her, and although Perkins chose her roles deliberately, rarely appearing in more than one project a year, audiences knew her best as the human version of Wilma in 1994's The Flintstones. In the late '90s, Perkins gave TV a go, appearing in a number of TV-movies and miniseries, and in 2005, the small screen rewarded her with the star-making role she never found on the big screen: the hilariously manic Celia Hodes on Showtime's Weeds. After five seasons and three Emmy nominations, Perkins announced in 2010 that she was leaving the popular cable comedy to pursue other projects.