Last Updated: 5:26PM BST 17 Apr 2009
An attractive young woman who had begun her career as a mainstream actress, Marilyn Chambers first found fame as the smiling blonde cuddling a laughing, nappy-clad baby on a popular brand of soap powder. When she then appeared in an adult film featuring hard-core inter-racial sex, Procter & Gamble, whose products were claimed to be "100% pure," quickly pulled the boxes from the shelves.
Although it was later discovered that she had also had a small role in the 1970 Barbra Streisand film The Owl and the Pussycat, it was her porn debut that changed Marilyn Chambers's fortunes irrevocably.
"Back then in my naive brain I was thinking that something like Behind the Green Door had never been done before," she explained, "and the way our sexual revolution was travelling I really thought it was going to be a stepping stone which would further my acting career." She followed it up with the hard-core films Resurrection of Eve in 1973 and Inside Marilyn Chambers in 1975.
In 1976 she announced she was giving up adult films to pursue other interests. She starred in the 1977 R-rated horror picture Rabid and put together a song-and-dance show that played in Las Vegas and elsewhere. But she returned to adult films in 1980 in Insatiable and for the rest of her career shuttled between sex and horror pictures.
Marilyn Ann Briggs was born on April 22 1952 in Providence, Rhode Island. As a teenager she became interested in acting and began working as a model, appearing in advertisements for shampoo and other products. She was working as an exotic dancer in San Francisco when she saw a newspaper advertisement seeking actresses for what was described as a "major" film. Only when she filled out the application form did she realise it was pornographic. The producers offered her the starring role.
Shot on a shoestring budget, Behind the Green Door became one of the biggest adult film hits of the 1970s, thanks to its unexpected publicity boost when a photograph from Marilyn Chambers's modelling career appeared on boxes of a popular brand of detergent, Ivory Snow. Marilyn Chambers went on to be ranked by Playboy magazine as one of the top 100 sex stars of the 20th century and was named among the top 10 adult film stars of all time. "The adult films have been a total pleasure," she once said. "They were like getting paid to live out my greatest fantasies. The rest of the stuff… sometimes got to be a real grind."
Marilyn Chambers, who was found dead on April 12, was married and divorced three times. One of her husbands, Chuck Traynor, had once been married to the porn actress Linda Lovelace. A daughter survives her.
