Biography

The crossover did not stay clean. Mainstream attention arrived, then receded, and she kept working in a business that was already changing under her: film gave way to video, features to scenes, theaters to living rooms. She stayed longer than the wave that carried her, touring, appearing, doing the unglamorous work of being a name that still sold tickets. There is no tidy arc in that. A performer who becomes a symbol early spends the rest of a career beside the symbol, and she did it with more grace than the industry deserved.

She died in 2009, and the obituaries spent most of their space on the first few years of her career, which is both unfair and understandable. The early films are the ones that changed what adult cinema was allowed to be, and no later work could compete with that. What remains is a small, sharp body of features, a handful of photographs and a name that still works as shorthand for a particular kind of 1970s confidence. She was never an innocent and never pretended to be one. That is why the image held.