Traci Lords in Cry Baby

TRACI LORDS

Sometimes necessity is the mother of invention. Traci Lords began building a mainstream career after a particularly scandalous exit from the porn world. In 1986 it was revealed that all of Lords' adult video work, save one picture, the Paris-shot Traci, I Love You, had been made while Lords was underage — and hence, child porn, and hence, completely illegal.

The story had a huge negative impact on the adult industry, which still has not forgiven Lords. "I think Traci Lords is a disgrace," then-Wicked Girl Devinn Lane told me in an interview a few years back. "She came into this business with ID that could have passed for legit anywhere, and bamboozled everybody." As readers of Lords' 2003 memoir Underneath It All know, the feeling is mutual. The book is suffused with a seething loathing for the porn industry and she has zero good words for anybody in it. It is extremely safe to say that hell will truly freeze over before Lords makes a porn comeback.

After the scandal broke and Lords got out from under most of the legal hassles associated with it, she first went the exploitation route, appearing in an R-rated remake of the Roger Corman classic Not of This Earth, co-starring with future Blind Date host Roger Lodge. She did a couple of topless scenes in the film but has since eschewed nudity. She found a mentor in purveyor of comedic filth John Waters, who cast her in his films Cry Baby and Serial Mom. And, as is apparently de rigueur for one-time adult performers trying to go legit, she gave singing a shot, doing backing vocals on the Ramones' album Acid Eaters and releasing her own (not bad) quasi-techno album, 1,000 Fires.

She's never quite cracked the A-list, but she has kept working, mostly quite creditably, but in periods when work got a bit thinner, she did go the cheesecake calendar route, and submit to autograph signing sessions at fan conventions (although she's been known to smack down fans who present her with stills from her porn days, even non-X-rated ones). This year she'll have a supporting role in the next Kevin Smith comedy, a satire of the amateur sex-tape phenomenon titled Zack and Miri Make A Porno.

NEXT: Ginger Lynn Allen.