Yvonne d’Angers

Career

Born in Tehran in September 1944, d’Angers reached the United States around 1959 and moved to San Francisco in 1962, dancing at North Beach clubs including Gigi’s and the Off Broadway, where the press nicknamed her "the Persian Lamb" after her Iranian background. In 1965, following Carol Doda’s topless act at the Condor Club, she was one of four dancers arrested in raids on North Beach clubs; the court found that topless dancing was not obscene because it did not violate the community standards of San Francisco, making the city the first in the United States where the practice was lawful. Facing deportation in 1966 over an allegedly fraudulent 1961 marriage, she had her agent chain her to the Golden Gate Bridge on 30 August and threw the key over her shoulder into the bay in front of news cameras; the deportation order was never carried out. She took roles in three films, moved to Las Vegas in 1974 with her husband, the Off Broadway’s owner, and died there on 3 June 2009 at sixty-four.

Signature: The only person in the English-language record who was publicly, professionally and self-evidently an Iranian working in American adult entertainment — and she was a dancer rather than a pornographic film performer, which is why she is presented here and not ranked.

Best known for

Mainstream credits

• Defendant in the 1965 San Francisco obscenity case that established topless dancing as not obscene
• Portrait in the Diane Arbus collection An Aperture Monograph
• Playboy, September 1966

Official links

No official accounts confirmed. We only list handles we have verified on an authoritative page — a guessed handle in this industry usually belongs to an impersonator.

Sources and verification2 sources

Last audited 22 August 2026 · Wikipedia — Yvonne d’Angers · Wikidata — Yvonne d’Angers

Not yet confirmed:

• The English Wikipedia article rests substantially on an obituary, a vintage-culture blog and a television archive rather than on contemporaneous newspaper reporting
• Nothing in the record describes any pornographic film work; she is presented as an adult-entertainment performer and explicitly not as a pornographic film performer
• Her own statements about her Iranian background, beyond the public record of the 1966 deportation fight, are not documented in any source we could reach
• Her legal name is published on English Wikipedia and is deliberately not reproduced in this record