Sunday, December 30, 2007
Saturday, December 29, 2007
How Ashlyn Gere Went from My Classroom to Porn Stardom
How Ashlyn Gere Went from My Classroom to Porn Stardom
By Jack Sheehan •
It was 1980 and the first day of the fall semester in English 101 at UNLV. A roomful of 18- and 19-year-olds sat stone-faced, braced for the unpleasant. The anxiety on their faces suggested the moments before a root canal. I would be assigning a short in-class essay to get a feel for the talent, or lack thereof, that I would be molding over the next four months. As I wrote my name on the blackboard, I heard the click click click of pointed heels on the tile. I paused and turned. It was a dazzling young woman with short brown hair. She gave me a sheepish smile and shrugged. "Sorry," she said. "I couldn't find the room."
She wore hermetically sealed jeans and a gold waist chain. In the interest of maintaining teacher-student decorum, I did my best to act unimpressed as she slid coyly into a front-row desk. My 18-year-old male students weren't as restrained. One actually whistled, which drew some giggles.
Hers was the first essay I read when I returned to my office. The topic was "My Dream Career." She wrote about wanting to become an actress, about how one day she would make her mark in Hollywood.
Well, there's no denying she became a film star.
To her thousands of fans who faithfully rent or buy her movies or subscribe to her website or pay a cover charge to see her dance, and to the members of her genre who have elected her to their hall of fame, Ashlyn Gere is a major star. But she rarely gets approached in shopping malls for an autograph, and even those who do recognize her are probably reluctant to admit it.
How she came to be one of the most popular actresses ever to have wild sex on camera, and how for more than a decade she has sustained a career in a business that chews up and spits out most young women in a year or two, interested me both personally and professionally. Despite the fact that she was irresistibly cute and demurely sexy as a student at UNLV, and athletic and charismatic enough to be a four-year cheerleader for the Runnin' Rebel teams of the Jerry Tarkanian glory years, I never would have guessed that of the hundreds of students I taught in my five years in front of a classroom, she would be the one to pursue porno as a career. She just seemed too bubbly and innocent. After one semester she gave me a coffee mug with the name "Brillo" inscribed on it, a clear reference to my being follicly challenged. I kidded her that it was too late for apple-polishing, that the final grades had been turned in. She said, "Oh, whatever grade I get is fine. I just wanted you to know that I enjoyed the class" ...
Biography
In the 1980s she was an actress in several B-movies: for example, 1987's Creepozoids, in which she plays the character "Kate" and is billed as Kim McKamy. She was a body double in the films Basic Instinct and Indecent Proposal. Gere began working in adult films in 1990, becoming renowned for her very athletic performances. She acted under the name Kimberly Patton in the television series Space: Above and Beyond from 1995 to 1996; she also appeared under that name in episodes of Silk Stalkings and Millennium.
Gere began acting in pornographic films during the same time frame as her bit part career in mainstream acting. She continued her pornographic career while playing on the shows listed above, becoming one of the few actresses to successfully balance both mainstream and pornographic careers (as opposed to the usual tactic of focusing exclusively on one aspect or the other). She has also appeared under the Patton name in the films The One and Willard, and was credited as Kimberly Ashlyn Gere for an appearance on The X-Files.
She has been married to Marshall Patton (a.k.a. Layne Parker) since 1988 and they have one child together. She lives in Texas and works as a real estate agent.
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