As the porn star who briefly did as much for Ivory Snow as Liberace did for the ivories, Marilyn Chambers, with her blonde good looks, turned 1972's Behind the Green Door into a pop-culture phenomenon.
p>Unlike many of her peers from the porn-pioneer era, Chambers, who was found dead Sunday of an undetermined cause just 10 days before her 57<>But long before Chambers' body was discovered by her teen daughter in the actress's mobile home in Santa Clarita, Calif., Chambers was frank about her past battles with alcohol and drug abuse. Though her credits included soft-core endeavors that were once staples on late-night cable, she spent later years exploiting her notoriety.p>Chambers, who was married three times and known for conducting interviews in the nude, even received 946 votes for vice president on the Personal Choice party ticket in the 2004 presidential election.p>The product of a middle-class Connecticut upbringing, Chambers (then Marilyn Ann Briggs) pursued a modeling and acting career while still in her late teens. In 1970, billed as quot;Evelyn Lang,quot; she played Robert Klein's girlfriend in Barbra Streisand's The Owl and the Pussycat.p>Her other major early credit: posing as a fresh-faced mother holding a newborn against her cheek on a box of Ivory Snow.p>Folklore has it that Chambers agreed to appear in Behind the Green Door with multiple sex partners for a then-unheard-of percentage of the gross, which filmmakers Artie and Jim Mitchell, aka the Mitchell Brothers, agreed to.p>With the actress looking more like a cheerleader than a porn star, Behind the Green Door became a smash date movie. At that point, she was identified as the Ivory model and, with its slogan of quot;99.44/100% pure,quot; Procter amp; Gamble pulled the boxes off the shelves, but not before a blizzard of Snow was sold.p>Chambers spoke no dialogue in Behind the Green Door, which added to her mystique, a quality that was lost in the 1975 follow-up, The Resurrection of Eve.p>A young David Cronenberg gave her the lead in his 1977 horror film, Rabid, but it failed to launch a mainstream career. Instead, Chambers embarked on a porn comeback with Insatiable (1980), which led to Insatiable II (1984) and Still Insatiable (1999).p>Fans remained uncommonly loyal. Googling her name brings up a 1975 paperback autobiography, Marilyn Chambers: My Story, now selling on Amazon.com from $25 to $178.55.p>In 2000, actress Tracy Hutson played her in Showtime's Rated X, about the Mitchell Brothers. But the high point of the DVD is Chambers herself reminiscing about suds, a green door and those insatiable old days./>
