Linda Lovelace, who died on April 22nd aged 53, was both the best and worst advertisement for pornography. As the star of Deep Throat (1972), she helped make porn "chic". For a little while after its release, the dirty film ceased to exist, while the triple-X adult feature provided a night out for swinging couples.
Yet only eight years later, in her third autobiography, Ordeal, Linda Lovelace claimed she had been hypnotised, beaten and threatened at gunpoint to have sex in front of the cameras - and she spent the rest of her life campaigning against pornography.
She also claimed that two earlier autobiographies, The Intimate Diary Of Linda Lovelace and Inside Linda Lovelace - in which she made statements like "I live for sex" - had been fabricated by ghost-writers.
As for the facts, it is generally accepted that she was born on January 10th, 1949, Linda Boreman, the daughter of a New York policeman, in the Bronx, and had an unhappy home life. After leaving school, she may have worked in a boutique and as a photographer. In 1970, she met Charles "Chuck" Traynor, a pornographer who made "loops", short 8mm films, sold and shown illegally. Linda Lovelace appeared in at least eight, the most notorious of which showed her having sex with a dog. She and Traynor married.
Deep Throat was not the first hardcore feature film to test New York's obscenity laws, and it is technically and artistically of very poor quality. But it had a relatively big budget of $24,000, and a lot of publicity. Linda Lovelace, quite pretty, but thin and angular - and nothing like the pouting, big-breasted Playboy models that American men have always preferred - plays a woman who, because her clitoris is in her throat, can only find satisfaction through oral sex, something she appears to do with enthusiasm.
Somewhat surprisingly, the reviews praised the film's style and humour, and soon New York society began to patronise the World cinema, a grind-house near Times Square.
By 1973, the title was so well known that a Washington Post editor used it as a pseudonym for a Watergate informer.
Linda Lovelace appeared in three more films: the inevitable Deep Throat Part II (1974); then Linda Lovelace Meets Miss Jones (1975), opposite another porn superstar, Georgina Spelvin; and, finally, Linda Lovelace For President (1975), an unsuccessful soft core comedy.
It was after she divorced Traynor, who married Marilyn Chambers, a more conventional porn beauty, that Linda Lovelace claimed she had been forced into pornography. The press was generally sceptical but, although she named names, nobody sued.
Linda Lovelace later became a star attraction again, but at events organised by Women Against Pornography, and, in 1984, she testified at hearings of the Meese Commission, established by President Reagan to investigate the effects of pornography on women and children.
Yet another autobiography, Out of Bondage (1986), made more rumours official, notably that "one of New York's five Mafia families" had profited from the success of Deep Throat.
Exactly by how much is still not known: the most quoted amount is $600 million, but many reports put the true figure in excess of the $750 million earned by Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone, officially the world's most successful film.
In Out Of Bondage, Linda Lovelace also claimed that she had contracted hepatitis from a contaminated blood transfusion, and breast cancer from silicone implants that Traynor had demanded. Certainly, last year in a television interview she looked almost unrecognisable.
Based in Denver, Colorado, since 1990, she is survived by her second husband, Larry Marchiano, and their two children.
Linda Lovelace (Linda Susan Boreman): born 1949; died, April 2002