There have been a few actresses that seamlessly worked in Hollywood films and adult films too. Lets list them and discuss!
Colleen Brennan aka Sharon Kelly made quite a few Drive In thrillers. Scream in the Streets (with a young Chuck Norris) is one of her best. She also had quite a career in classic adult film. One of my favorite redheads. She was a very good character actress. Raspy voice, red hair, full body seemed comfortable with either style of film.
Ginger Lynn was in NYPD Blue and a short lived tv show called Super Force. She was a 80’s adult star and left for tv and film work. Then returned to adult films in the late 90’s.
Traci Lords would be the most obvious and most succesful in recent times. A few have sort of had something of a back-and-forth commute between Adult and Mainstream, two who come to my mind are Ginger Lynn Allen and Kimberly Patton/Ashlyn Gere, but never to that degree of Mainstream success. Generally speaking ISTM unless they make a “clean break” it’s a very hard time becoming established in the Mainstream, and even then it’s nearly impossible to become a leading player, the ex-porn or part-time-porn player becomes stuck in smaller roles.
Veronica Hart was a respected 80’s adult star and considered a good actress. The mainstream roles she got were tiny and kind of sad for someone with her talent.
She still looks really good now in her late fifties.
Some trivia. She was badly burned on her arm and side. I think a coffee urn spilled on her. She always kept that burned side covered in her adult films. It was rarely ever seen.
Elvira (Cassandra Peterson) had a scene in a soft porn flick, The Working Girls. One of the funniest real stripper scenes I’ve ever seen, where she reacts to the exposure of her own boobs in a manner not usual among strippers.
I remember seeing Susan Dey (L.A. Law) in a soft porn flick, too, but I can’t remember which one.
There were plenty of decent actresses in the early days of porn, when it was shot in New York City. They could draw upon the legion aspiring Broadway players, and before home video, they could make a reasonable bet that their porn films would show in a theater for a few weeks, then disappear. No producer was going to admit that they recognized them from seeing “that sort of movie”.
Georgina Spelvin was like that, a struggling chorus member who did plenty of work in shows like The Pajama Game, and chose for her her nom de porn the female acting “Alan Smithee” type name. She’s done plenty of small roles in mainstream film, and is still working as a makeup artist and as a computer graphics artist.
The John Derek film 10 has a party scene in which a number of porn actresses are seen. Sort of literally, since Dudley Moore is spying on them with a telescope. IMDb lists Annette Haven, Dorothy LeMay, Constance Money, Candida Royalle, and Serena. Derek did an actual x film with Haven called Love You! The cast included Wade Nichols, who went on to the soap opera The Edge of Night.
If Skinemax-type films are included then the list gets huge since they now include lots of adult actresses who are more than willing to take their tops off.
Angelique Pettyjohn, who was the green-haired Shahna in the Star Trek episode “The Gamesters of Triskelion,” had bit parts in some major films (including *The Odd Couple *and Repo Man) as well as numerous TV appearances. She also did porn under various names.
As for Susan Dey, you might be thinking of the weak Crichton film Looker, in which she did a partial nude scene as she was being “scanned.” Not sure if it was a body double or not.
And, of course, Virginia Madsen has straddled the spectrum from Oscar winner to some very hard-R/softcore stuff.
I’m guessing he’s very much a breast man, and didn’t notice the rest.