Erica Gavin
Career
Born Donna Graff in Los Angeles, the daughter of the blacklisted actor Fred Graff, she was working as a topless dancer at nineteen when she found an audition notice for Russ Meyer’s Vixen! in a copy of Variety in a dentist’s waiting room. The title role made her a star of low-budget independent cinema. Meyer cast her again as Roxanne in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), a 20th Century Fox release written by the film critic Roger Ebert, and she later played Jacqueline Wilson in Jonathan Demme’s Caged Heat (1974). She lives in Los Angeles and works as a stylist.
Signature: Her best-known film was released by a major Hollywood studio and written by a Pulitzer-winning film critic, which is the fact that makes the sexploitation-versus-pornography distinction concrete rather than semantic.
Best known for
Beyond performing
- Stylist
Mainstream credits
- Vixen! (1968)
- Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970, 20th Century Fox)
- Caged Heat (1974)
Official links
Appears in
Ranked alongside
Sources and verification1 source
- Full filmography after 1974
- Physical statistics
