Linda Lovelace Biography

Linda Lovelace was the adult film actress who starred in the sexually explicit film Deep Throat (1972) and became a 1970s pop culture celebrity.

It was all against her will, as it turns out — or at least that’s what she was saying by the time of her 1980 autobiography Ordeal. For the next decade, she used her celebrity to draw attention to the feminist group Women Against Pornography, but she never escaped her past, which included drug abuse and “peep show” films that she had made prior to Deep Throat.

A tall brunette with “girl next door” features, Linda Lovelace was one of the first famous stars of pornographic films. She followed Deep Throat with other sequels: Deep Throat Part II (1974); Linda Lovelace Meets Miss Jones (1975), and Linda Lovelace For President (1975). But by the time of her death in 2002 — the victim of a fatal car collision — hers was a long, sad story of being exploited, both by the porn industry and the anti-porn movement.

The name Deep Throat gained even wider fame in another context: as the nickname of the shadowy figure who helped Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward uncover the Watergate scandal during the presidency of Richard Nixon. Because the mysterious source would only talk on “deep background,” he was given the nickname by Post senior editor Howard Simons, who borrowed the title from Lovelace’s then-popular film.