When Deep Throat opened in a regular Times Square movie theater in 1972, nobody could have predicted where the adult film industry would end up: a global business worth billions, a subject of Supreme Court debates and, more than once, a footnote in American political history.
Some of the people who shaped it crossed over into Hollywood. Others ended up in court, in rehab or in the history books. This list is not about who made the most films. It is about who left the biggest mark, counting down from ten to one.
10. Vanessa del Rio
In the mid-1970s, the industry was dominated by blonde, all-American actresses. Then Ana Maria Sanchez from Harlem, the daughter of Cuban and Puerto Rican immigrants, arrived on set in 1974. As Vanessa del Rio she became the first Latina star of the genre.
She refused the roles that were handed to Latina actresses at the time, the submissive maid and the hot-blooded side character, and played confident, funny leads instead. She quit in 1986 as the AIDS crisis hit the industry, but her name lived on. In the 1990s rappers like The Notorious B.I.G. and Lil’ Kim name-checked her, and art publisher Taschen later devoted a lavish photo book to her career.
9. Rocco Siffredi
Rocco Tano grew up in the small Italian port town of Ortona and was working in his brother’s restaurant in Paris when French producers spotted him in a nightclub. He took his screen name from Roch Siffredi, the gangster Alain Delon played in Borsalino (1970).
From his base in Budapest, Siffredi went on to appear in and direct well over a thousand titles, building one of the biggest production companies in Europe. He also made a rare jump into serious art house cinema, with roles in Catherine Breillat’s controversial films Romance (1999) and Anatomy of Hell (2004). In 2024, Netflix turned his turbulent life into the drama series Supersex.
8. Stormy Daniels
Inside the industry, Stephanie Clifford from Louisiana was already known as an award-winning writer and director. Outside it, she became part of American political history after a meeting with Donald Trump at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe in 2006.
Days before the 2016 presidential election, Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen paid her $130,000 to keep quiet about what she said happened between them. Trump has always denied the encounter. The way that payment was booked as legal expenses led to a historic trial: in May 2024 a New York jury found Trump guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying business records. In January 2025, ten days before his second inauguration, the judge sentenced him to an unconditional discharge, which left the conviction in place without any punishment. That made Trump the first US president to take office with a criminal conviction.
7. John Holmes
Thousands of short loops and a string of feature films, including the series about private eye Johnny Wadd, made John Holmes the first male superstar of the genre in the 1970s. Studios advertised his anatomy with numbers that were wildly exaggerated, according to his first wife, and the legend inspired Mark Wahlberg’s character in Boogie Nights (1997).
The real story was much darker. By the late 1970s Holmes was addicted to freebase cocaine and running errands for Los Angeles drug dealer Eddie Nash. After a gang robbed Nash’s house in 1981, Holmes was linked to the revenge attack that followed: the Wonderland murders, in which four people were beaten to death. He was acquitted in 1982. Years later he kept his HIV diagnosis from co-stars, and he died of AIDS-related complications in March 1988, aged 43.
6. Traci Lords
In 1984, fifteen-year-old Nora Kuzma walked into talent agencies in Los Angeles with a fake ID. As Traci Lords she appeared in Penthouse and made close to a hundred films in two years, becoming one of the best-paid actresses of the moment. Nobody checked whether her documents were real.
When her real date of birth came out in May 1986, days after her eighteenth birthday, the fallout was enormous. Video stores and distributors across the US pulled her tapes within days, afraid of being prosecuted for distributing images of a minor. The scandal led directly to the strict federal age verification rules the American industry still works with today. Lords studied acting, rebuilt her career in mainstream films like John Waters’ Cry-Baby (1990) and Blade (1998), and never looked back.
5. Sasha Grey
Marina Ann Hantzis moved from Sacramento to Los Angeles in 2006, just after turning eighteen, with an unusually clear plan. She named herself after KMFDM singer Sascha Konietzko and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, quoted French philosophers in interviews and in 2008 became the youngest winner of the AVN Award for Female Performer of the Year.
That intellectual edge got Hollywood’s attention. Steven Soderbergh cast her as the lead in The Girlfriend Experience (2009), and she played herself in HBO’s Entourage. In 2011, at 23, she walked away from the industry to work as a musician, author and, later, a full-time streamer.
4. Mia Khalifa
Her entire career lasted about three months. In late 2014, Beirut-born Mia Khalifa, then 21, filmed around a dozen videos. One scene in which she wore a hijab went viral worldwide, made her the most searched performer on the biggest free sites and triggered a storm of outrage in the Middle East, including death threats.
She quit almost immediately. In a 2019 BBC HARDtalk interview she said she had earned about $12,000 in total, while the videos kept collecting views by the hundreds of millions without her seeing a cent. Since then she has become one of the loudest critics of contracts that tie young performers to content they can never take back, and she has built a career as a commentator, streamer and entrepreneur far outside the industry.
3. Ron Jeremy
Before he became “The Hedgehog”, Ronald Jeremy Hyatt had a master’s degree in special education and taught in New York. A girlfriend sent his photo to Playgirl in 1978, and that was the start of a career of more than 2,000 film appearances. For decades he was treated as a harmless pop culture mascot, showing up in music videos and comedies.
That image collapsed when dozens of women accused him of sexual assault. In 2020 he was charged in Los Angeles with more than 30 counts of rape and sexual assault involving 21 alleged victims between 1996 and 2019. The case never went to trial: in January 2023 a judge ruled that severe, irreversible dementia made him incompetent to stand trial, and he was placed in a care facility.
2. Jenna Jameson
Rejected as a Las Vegas showgirl because she wore braces, Jenna Massoli started out as a stripper and model in the early 1990s. As Jenna Jameson she became the biggest star of the video era, but her real legacy is business.
She was the first woman in the industry to take control of her own image and profits. Her company ClubJenna, founded in 2000, started as a single website and grew into a multimillion-dollar operation that also ran sites for other performers. Her memoir How to Make Love Like a Porn Star spent weeks on The New York Times bestseller list in 2004, Madame Tussauds made a wax figure of her, and in 2006 she sold ClubJenna to Playboy. In many ways she wrote the playbook that creators on platforms like OnlyFans follow today.
1. Linda Lovelace
In the summer of 1972, people lined up around the block at the World Theater in New York to see Deep Throat, a film shot in six days in Florida on a budget of around $25,000. Celebrities went openly, the press coined the term “porno chic” and the film went on to earn many millions. It was the moment adult film entered mainstream culture.
Its star, Linda Boreman, saw almost none of that money. Her fee of $1,250 went straight to her husband and manager, Chuck Traynor. In her 1980 memoir Ordeal, she said Traynor had forced her into prostitution and the film with beatings, threats and a gun, a claim she repeated under oath and after passing a polygraph test. Testifying before a US government commission in 1986, she said that anyone who watched Deep Throat was watching her being raped. She spent the rest of her life speaking out against the industry that made her famous and died in April 2002, aged 53, after a car accident in Denver.
