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by **stomperrob** » Tue Apr 14, 2009 2:42 pm

Marilyn Chambers, the Ivory Snow Porn Star, Dead at 56
By Richard Corliss
Monday, Apr. 13, 2009

People in the '70s knew two things about Marilyn Chambers: she had appeared as a model on an Ivory Snow box, fondly holding an infant under the corporate slogan "99 and 44/100% Pure"; and she starred in Behind the Green Door, one of the first, weirdest and most popular hard-core movies in that brief period of the '70s known as "porno chic." These two factettes, with their colliding irony, made the blond, willowy Chambers the pinup princess of XXX cinema, a notoriety she parlayed into a career in soft- and hard-core sex films that lasted from 1972 until ... yesterday.

The sad news is that Chambers, to quote the title from a 1974 movie she did not appear in, is 99 and 44/100% dead. The actress was discovered last night in her mobile home in Santa Clarita, near Los Angeles, by her teenage daughter McKenna Taylor, from the last of Chambers' three marriages. An autopsy will be performed; foul play is not suspected.

Chambers wasn't the first person to take the route from modeling and acting to hard-core, from commercials to pervertials. Eric Edwards, whose porn career spanned nearly four decades, had appeared in ads for Gillette razors and Close-Up toothpaste. But of all the shadow stars that emerged from the early porn sensation — Linda Lovelace and Harry Reems of Deep Throat, Georgina Spelvin of Devil in Miss Jones — Chambers was unusual in her Waspy good looks, her girl-next-door appeal and her use of her real name at a time when other actors resorted to jokey pseudonyms. If the Ivory Snow girl could go into porn unashamed, then maybe the genre wasn't so sooty. She was different, and smart, in another way: when co-directors Jim and Artie Mitchell asked Chambers to star in Green Door, she demanded $25,000 (an astronomical sum in the pinchpenny industry) and a percentage of the gross. And she got it.

con't...

rest of article: http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0 ... 27,00.html