Adult-film enthusiasts who’ll go to this weekend to the megaplexes to see Inherent Vice, Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest, may be surprised to see hardcore porn legend Belladonna (using her real name Michelle Sinclair) in a brief role as a slinky-yet-insightful temptress. Of course, she’s not the only skin-flick siren to slip into the mainstream world — not even in Anderson's own filmography.
So here we go with a list of 10 porn actors and actresses who found their way into legitimate (and not-so-legitimate) movie work.
1. Georgina Spelvin, I Spit On Your Corpse (1974)
Not to be confused with the just-as-graphic terror fave I Spit On Your Grave, the Devil in Miss Jones star does some memorable topless ass-kicking in this, playing an on-the-run prostitute in this sexploitation crime film from the cheapo folk at Troma Entertainment.
2. Marilyn Chambers, Rabid (1977)
The former model-turned-porn legend got together with a young Canadian director named David Cronenberg and starred in this horror freakout as a woman who spreads a disease (thanks to a phallic stinger hidden in her armpit) that turns people into rabid zombies. An allegory on the dangers of casual sex, starring the Behind the Green Door vixen herself? I think so.
3. Traci Lords, Not of This Earth (1988)
Famous for nearly toppling the adult-film industry when it was discovered she made hundreds of films while she was still a minor, Lords later went legit, appearing in John Waters’ Cry-Baby and Matthew Wilder's Your Name Here and guest-starring on Roseanne. But her first foray in respectable acting was starring in this Roger Corman sci-fi remake, which is also the last time she ever got nude on camera.
4. Nina Hartley, Boogie Nights (1997)
Although Paul Thomas Anderson's breakout movie about the porn industry (showing midnight tonight and Saturday at The Belcourt) is festering with X-rated extras and day players, the most memorable standout is veteran cougar Hartley, playing the shamelessly unfaithful wife of William H. Macy’s long-suffering cinematographer Little Bill. Her comeuppance is definitely not sexy.
5. Rocco Siffredi, Romance (1999)
This world-renowned, well-endowed Italian Stallion would soon become a go-to stud for French provocateur Catherine Breillat. In both this film and her equally graphic Anatomy of Hell, he plays a sexually uninhibited man, ready and willing to loosen up the confused, female protagonist.
6. Jenna Jameson, Zombie Strippers (2008)
Long before she became the Courtney Love of porn (translation: a walking mess), X-rated superstar Jameson made her big-screen debut in this silly-ass horror show, where she and a bunch of other bitchy, butt-bald-nekkid ladies become zombie table dancers.
7. Katie Morgan, Zack & Miri Make a Porno (2008)
Yet another mainstream film about making porn that features real porn stars in the cast, Kevin Smith’s thinly-veiled take on the pitfalls of indie filmmaking had Traci Lords (again) and this baby-voiced cutie as bit players in Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks’s adult-film debut.
8. Sasha Grey, The Girlfriend Experience (2009)
Steven Soderbergh turned a lot of heads with this flick, not only because he cast the waifish young porn princess as the main character, a high-priced call girl making ends meet in the economically paranoid Aughts, but also because the girl actually turned out a decent performance. Watch for Glenn Kenny!
9. Riley Steele, Piranha 3D (2010)
This porn star served as three-dimensional eye candy (along with the quite buxom Kelly Brook) in this campy, gory remake of the 1978 Joe Dante/John Sayles B-movie. Steele’s shining moment comes when she and Brook skinny-dip in a scene critic Nathan Rabin once perfectly called an “underwater skank ballet.”
10. James Deen, The Canyons (2013)
The contemporary porn player got a lot of mileage (GQ did a profile on him and everything!) out of starring opposite ever-speeding trainwreck Lindsay Lohan, as they played a pair of nihilistic Angelino lovers in Paul Schrader’s icy fleshbath. After appearing in this, is it any wonder he went back to the safe, predictable confines of porn filmmaking?
