SUMMER STARS

It happens every year. Certain summer films give certain actors a chance to bloom. But what happens once the warm weather ends? We checked in on a decade’s worth of summer stars to see what’s happened since.

1978: MARY LOUISE WELLER IN ‘ANIMAL HOUSE’

Weller readily admits, in a voice that sounds thickened with gravel, that she’ll never quite live down the scene in “National Lampoon’s Animal House” in which John Belushi stands atop a ladder, peeping through a window as she undresses.

“I should get a T-shirt with a window,” Weller said with a laugh. Weller, who made her first on-camera appearance in “Serpico” five years earlier, followed up “Animal House” with TV guest spots including “Starsky and Hutch” and “CHiPs.” And lots of TV movies. “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. In ‘The Bell Jar,’ I was the only character who wasn’t suicidal.”

She was on a Greek island making the low-budget horror film “The Red Tide” when she told herself: “No more junk.”

She hasn’t been in many films since, aside from romancing Chuck Norris in “Forced Vengeance,” because “I wanted to go to Hong Kong,” and appearing in an upcoming French film directed by Just Jaeckin (“The Story of O,” “Emmanuelle”).

“I did a bunch of plays in New York,” she said, “And out of that came a play I wrote called ‘Four Alone.’ With a girlfriend, I got a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to perform it at the Greenhouse Theater in Pasadena. And I wrote another script which Mark Carliner bought.”

Weller next hopes to produce a film, from her script, based on the life of jockey Mary Bacon. “Maybe I’ll play her. That’s why I bought it (the rights to the story),” said Weller, who trained with the U.S. Equestrian Team when she was a teen-ager and now rides competitively.

In fact, three horses share her three-acre spread in Malibu: “Maybe I got into acting to pay for the horses. I made a lot of money and didn’t spend it. Now I’m sitting on three acres it bought in Malibu.”