Kay Parker, RIP

Last week I learned that Kay Parker died last October. She was 78 years old. That is just too young.

She was born in Britain and moved, at age 21, to the United States, where she eventually became a celebrated actress in pornographic movies. Her career in the porn industry was relatively brief, probably a bit less than 10 years, but impressive. She was the polar opposite of Traci Lords, the under-aged porn star who nearly crashed the entire industry. (Since Lords was under-aged when she filmed all but one of her movies, the masters and all copies had to be recalled and destroyed, as they constituted child pornography.) Kay was in the vicinity of 33 years of age when she did her first sex scene on-screen.

Thirty-three is a bit old to be getting into that business, so she was naturally cast as The Older Woman, the mature woman, sometimes the divorced woman, and was almost always paired with younger male stars. Wikipedia states that she is best known for two movies: Dracula Sucks (1978) and Taboo (1980). I cannot comment on the first one, as I have not seen it. I have seen Taboo, and her performance in it is memorable.

Acting skills are not that highly prized in the porn business, but to me she came across as a reasonably good actress. After she left the porn industry she did a little mainstream acting - The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas, for example - so I suppose her acting skills were up to snuff. She seemed to enjoy her work. (If she didn’t, well, she really did have acting skills.) What struck me about her is that she just seemed to be comfortable playing herself. She was a naturally pretty woman.

After getting out of the business sometime in the mid-eighties, she did PR work for a video distribution service, wrote a memoir of her time in the industry (Taboo: Sacred, Don’t Touch), and eventually became a spiritual counselor.

The family did not release the cause of death. IMDb lists the cause of her death as cancer.

The golden age of porn is often given as a 15 year time span, from 1969 (the release date of Andy Warhol’s Blue Movie) to 1984. I am inclined to date the beginning of the golden age to 1972, with the release of Deep Throat. But regardless of your starting and ending points, I am safe in stating that Kay Parker was one of the gems of the golden age of porn.

She seems to have been happy with her life. Is there a better epitaph than that?