SKIN LIST: 11 Swingin' Celebrity Nude Scenes from 1979

Popular culture of 1979 was post-hippie, but not quite yuppie; post-disco, but not quite New Wave; and post-Star-Wars, but not quite completely infantilized by Steven Spielberg.

At local theaters (which were not quite all multiplexesyet), Hollywood continued to present movies for adults: mature stories for grown-up people featuring adult themes, adult story lines, and that most quintessentially adult artistic flourishnudity.

With home video still a few years in the future, grindhouses and drive-ins surged toward a crescendo, showcasing an explosion of exploitation that was also patently adult but not, to be sure, mature.

Let’s look now at some of our favorite nude scenes from 1979eleven, in total, in honor of the rating Dudley Mooreactually awards to Bo Derek in the movie 10.

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1. 10
NUDE: Bo Derek
TIME: (1:41)
SCENE: Braided Bo lies splayed out, butt up, in bed. She smokes a joint and rolls over to reveal her rack.

In the classic slapstick romance 10, writer-director Blake Edwards (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Victor/Victoria) addressed the first strains of aging on the collective Baby Boomer libido.

Dudley Moore stars as a 42-year-old songwriter who hits the eject button on his staid life in pursuit of the ultimate vision of youthful loveliness.

That picture of perfection, of course, is Bo Derek, whose image in a yellow bathing suit, jogging along a beach, instantly came to embody robust American sexuality in the late ’70s and early ’80s.

After a madcap trek that involves naked orgy cameos from Golden Age porn stars on the order of Annette Haven, Dorothy LeMay, Constance Money, Candida Royale, and Serenaalong with ass crack from Dee Wallace Stone, the future mother figure in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)Dudley tracks Bo down, gets her nude, and then decides that perhaps there’s more to existence than the fantasy he’s been chasing.

10 did blockbuster business and stands as one of the decade’s defining comedies. Moore went on to Arthur (1981) and temporary superstardom, while Bo Derek immediately emerged as the era’s preeminent blonde bombshell.

Bo posed for Playboy copious times, and while she never headlined another hit on the scale of 10, she does expose herself to electrifying effect in the skintastic classics Tarzan the Ape Man (1981), Bolero (1984), and Ghosts Can’t Do It (1989).

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2. THE AMITYVILLE HORROR
NUDE:Margot Kidder
TIME: (0:22)
SCENE: Chatting up her husband (James Brolin) and casually walking around her new bedroom in an open blouse, Margot’s mambos pop out into view.

It emerged from suburban Long Island, New York, in 1977 to spawn a “non-fiction” bestseller that captivated the masses like no book would again until The Da Vinci Code.

So omnipresent was that sinister house with its half-moon windows that looked like demonic eyes that, to have been around in the late ’70s, was to wonder: “Could the story of The Amityville Horror be true?”

A print property that hot naturally screams (get it?) to be made into a movie and, fortunately for schlock devotees, the rights to this Horror were nabbed by drive-in powerhouse American International Picturesworld-class purveyors of beach party movies, biker blowouts, and blaxploitation blitzkriegs.

With AIP in charge and sexually liberated Margot Kidder (fresh from playing Lois Lane in 1978’s Superman) nabbing the lead role, fans could count on Amityville to supply not just chills, but some potent naked thrills.

On July 27, 1979, The Amityville Horror haunted screens with all its signature spookery in tact: the hordes of flies, the invisible pig named Jodie, the disembodied voices seething, “Get OUT!”

Plus it boasted Margot Kidder’s bare breasts, and it is for those impressive perkers that this limp, lukewarm adaptation remains best remembered.

Nonetheless, Amityville was a monster hit (pun, as always, intended) and so, naturally, sequels swarmed.

Amityville II: The Possession (1982) sensitively chronicles the true-life mass murder that took place in the house prior to the events of Horror.

In 1974, 23-year-old Ronald “Butch” DeFeo dispatched his mother, father, two sisters, and two brothers via shotgun. He blamed voices in his head. In the movie his sister is portrayed by Diane Franklin (who, the same year, revealed the top of her lap fro in The Last American Virgin).

Of the eight initial titles in the franchise, plus the big-budget 2005 version, Amityville: Dollhouse (1991) showcases nudity from Lisa Robin Kelly of That ’70s Show; Amityville: It’s About Time (1992) exposes former Miss Universe Shawn Weatherly without her sash; and there’s some fleeting non-celebrity flesh in Amityville: The Next Generation (1993).

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3. AUTUMN BORN
NUDE: Dorothy Stratten
TIME: (0:46)
SCENE: Dorothy doffs her clothes, baring TA along the way. Then she relaxes in a bath, where her funbags float freely.

By being murdered, especially in so gruesome a manner (just think: point-blank shotgun blasts and post-mortem sodomy), Playboy Playmate Dorothy Stratten spawned a cottage industry of quasi-necrophiliac totems in memory of her buxom blondeness.

On TV, Jamie Lee Curtis starred in NBC’s Death of a Centerfold: The Dorothy Stratten Story (1981). On the big screen, Mariel Hemingway surgically enlarged her breasts to fill out the deceased’s bra cups in Star 80 (1983). Mariel also posed nude in Playboy to promote the Bob Fosse-directed drama.

Even Playboy itself tastefully released the documentary Dorothy Stratten: The Untold Story in 1985.

A key player in the events leading up to the loss of this luminous Vancouver native, filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich directed Dorothy in They All Laughed (1981), and it was for him that she left the husband that would eventually kill her.

Bogdanovich chronicled his side of the story in the book The Killing of the Unicorn: Dorothy Stratten, 1960-1980. And in 1988 he married Dorothy’s younger sister, Louise Stratten (they split in 2001).

So what of the cinematic legacy of Dorothy Stratten herself? After Dorothy scored Playmate of the Year status, she starred in the campy, R-rated sci-fi comedy Galaxina (1980).

She looks intergalactically resplendent in a slinky spacesuit on a poster that seems to portend the next Flesh Gordon but then keeps covered up throughout the actual movie.

Stratten fans had to hunt down, then, her obscure Canuxploitation opus Autumn Born (1979) in order to see this world-famous naked model get naked in a movie.

Autumn Born features Dorothy as a spoiled 17-year-old whose uncle arranges to have her kidnapped and sent to a “school of discipline” run by a dominatrix. And somehow, with that star and that classic "roughie" sexploitation plot, the movie is a snooze.

However, it’s also the one place you can see Dorothy Stratten whipped, spanked, scrubbed by her mistress, and then, finally, relaxing in a bath nude.

And it is in Autumn Born that Dorothy Stratten nakedly lives on into eternity.

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4. BENEATH THE VALLEY OF THE ULTRA-VIXENS
NUDE: Uschi Digard
TIME: (1:29)
SCENE: First in milkmaid garb, Uschi carries buckets of the white stuff on her shoulders. Then we see her in the desert, pouring it all over her boulders.

Russ Meyer’s final theatrically released over-the-top(less) flesh feast is co-written by Roger Ebert and explodes off the screen as a fitting capper on the career of the Virtuoso of Voluptuousness.

Swedish-born, stupendously stacked Uschi Digard made an all-natural fit for Meyer’s bombastically bosom-centric cinematic sensibility. She collaborated with Meyer on three projects both as an actress and associate producer, most notably Supervixens! (1975).

Uschi pops up repeatedly in Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens as SuperSoul, an update of her Native American character Soul in Harry, Cherry Raquel.

In perhaps the most inspired casting moment in the entire Meyer canon, Uschi’s swooshies overflow the low-cut neckline of a dirndl as she performs milkmaid duties.

A moment later, Uschi’s own mammoth milkers abound, utterly exposed during a kinetic sequence wherein she drenches herself in the hills of a desert. What glorious mounds! What heat!

At the end of Ultra-Vixens, we see Uschi nude once more, while she indulges the secondary obsession of this particular Meyer opus: anal sex.

Russ Meyer essentially retired after Ultra-Vixens, while Uschi Digard moved on to non-hardcore, mostly lesbian work in XXX-rated movies.

Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens sends both of these larger-than-lust talents into their twilights with great style, hot action, hard laughs, and, of course, miles upon miles of cleavage that goes on forever. Still.

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5. THE BITCH
NUDE: Joan Collins
TIME: (0:23)
SCENE: Corset-clad Joan seductively chats up a chipper chap, then takes off her top and jiggles her naked juggables.

Before Joan Collins hit it big Stateside on ABC’s Dynasty, she was a British actress of some renown, familiar mostly for her marriage to song-and-dance man Anthony Newley and a memorable performance on the Harlan Ellison-penned Star Trek episode “City on the Edge of Forever.”

In between those '60s and '80s high points, though, the raven-maned temptress lit up movie screens as a sexual adventuress in The Stud (1978) and The Bitch (1979), a heady one-two punch adapted from novels by Joan’s famously dirty-minded sister, Jackie Collins.

Joan stars in both films as Fontaine Khaled, wife of a wealthy dullard and owner of Hobo, the decadent disco of her dreams. She appears nude, fleetingly but with terrific impact, multiple times throughout each chapter of this saucy saga.

The Stud and The Bitch proved to be smash hits worldwide, prompting TV magnate Aaron Spelling to take notice of Joan when plotting his blockbuster series Dynasty.

Her brash performance and undeniable heat rendered Joan perfect to play television’s still-ruling All-Time Queen Bitch, Alexis Carrington.

Too bad on TV she couldn’t continue to do it in the buff.

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6. CALIGULA
NUDES: Helen Mirren and Teresa Ann Savoy
TIME: (1:19)
SCENE: Raucously ripping about everything in sight as the mad emperor of the title, Malcolm McDowell conquers Helen, playing his empress, and Teresa Ann Savoy.

Caligula is cinema’s ultimate degenerate spectacle, a highbrow hardcore outrage on par with the wildest excesses of its ancient Rome setting.

Here, and only here, will you see top-tier British thespians step over extras engaging in up-close pornographic intercourse while inhuman violence and unspeakable, unsanitary transgressions against decency vividly rage full-bore all around them.

Malcolm McDowell plays history’s most reviled mad emperor. And Caligula is so given to satiating his every appetite that he need not choose between Helen Mirren as his wife, Caesonia, and Teresa Ann Savoy as his sister, Drusillahe can have them both at the same time! And he does, and they do. In fact, they do it all!

While the most erotically incendiary encounter in Caligula is actually the full-penetration lesbian chow down between Penthouse Pets Annika di Lorenzo and Lori Wagner, the nod for significance must go to Helen and Teresa, based on their unprecedented star power.

For schoolgirl-faced nubile Teresa, this level of naked kink was not too terribly dramatic a leap, as she was coming off Caligula director Tinto Brass’s Nazi whorehouse wonder Salon Kitty (1976).

Helen Mirren, though, had been a mainstream international actress since her nude debut in Age of Consent (1969). Post-Caligula, of course, Ms. Mirren has come to represent the uppermost echelons of class, grace, and acting ability. Better still, she's never stopped taking her clothes off on camera.

Long may she reign. Nude.

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7. HAIR
NUDE: Beverly D’Angelo
TIME: (0:59)
SCENE: Beverly shakes off her hippie get-up to go for a skinny-dip in a Central Park lake. Great bare boobs and wet panties.

Hair’s journey from 1967 Broadway smash to the movie musical a dozen years later is a curious one. You might wonder what the particular studio heads that took so long to make it weren’t smoking.

By 1979, the free-spirited flower children represented by the live production had largely grown up, moved on, and/or overdosed their way to a new sensibility.

Acclaimed director Milos Forman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The People vs. Larry Flynt) pressed on, though, cinematically immortalizing the “American Tribal Love-Rock Musical” right on the eve of the Reagan Revolution.

Regardless, Hair the movie does rock, and, after bombing in theaters, it became one of the very first mainstream cult classics to attain that stature via cable TV.

No doubt part of what attracted so many repeat viewings of Hair is Beverly D’Angelo nude in Central Park for a skinny-dip a full four years before she showed off her gargantuan Griswolds while showering in Vacation (1983).

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8. HARDCORE
NUDE: Season Hubley
TIME: 1:06
SCENE: Naked Season eases back in her peep show booth for paying customer George C. Scott.

Pornography ran so rampant circa 1979 that it could barely be contained in the adults-only movies where it played before the dawn of home video. Thus it spewed out in various powerful streams all over mainstream media.

Beyond constant TV news reports and magazine cover stories on the growing professional sex phenomenon, the jovial aspect of the pornogrification of America had X-rated stars cropping up in R-rated entertainment such as the aforementioned 10, while the dark side resulted in a plethora of bum-trip TV movies and the colossal heaviness of writer-director Paul Schrader’s Hardcore.

George C. Scott trounces the entirety of the erotic underworld as a devout Calvinist whose teenager daughter (Ilah Davis) disappears into the cesspool of illegal sex movies.

Teaming with Dick Sargent (the second Darren from Bewitched) and led down the stinking pink hole of low-rent commercial orgasm supply by private dick Peter Boyle (Young Frankenstein himself), our hero encounters all manner of smut rabble on his rescue mission.

Among them are hustler Big Dick Blacque (Hal Williams from Private Benjamin and 227) and peep show strutter Niki, deliciously embodied by A-cupped enchantress Season Hubley.

Season not only displays her tasty titlets while chatting up George at a whack shack, she also whoops it up on a porn set with a nude dude and redheaded XXX-queen Serenawho’s also naked in 10!

Lean, lanky Season’s only other noteworthy nude scene occurs in the cult shocker Vice Squad (1982), which shares Hardcore’s lethally intoxicating milieu of coitus-as-commodity on the mean backstreets and filthy basements of Hollywood.

Once again, Season portrays a pay-for-play sex worker, and, once again, her taut, tight, perpetually stiff-nippled physique can only be described as priceless.


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9. H.O.T.S.
NUDES: Angela Aames, Pamela Jean Bryant, Susan Lynn Kiger, Sandy Johnson, Kimberly Carson, Lisa London
TIME: (1:33)
SCENE: During a strip football game, our heroines convene for a huddle with their naked knockers hanging directly down into an upward-facing camera. This moment is the reason that cinematography was invented.

Honey (Susan Lynn Kiger), O’Hara (Lisa London), Terri (Pamela Jean Bryant), and Samantha (Kimberly Carson). That’s what H.O.T.S. stands for.

And together, along with sky-diving nudist Boom-Boom Bangs (Angela Aames) and a host of other collegiate darlings, H.O.T.S. comprises the most desirable sisterhood on a campus full of bikini-model-caliber coeds.

In fact, everybody wants a piece of the H.O.T.S., including a swimming bear, a trained circus seal, bumbling burglars, and Danny Bonaduce, hilariously putting on a "cool guy" act.

The high point of H.O.T.S. is its climactic strip football match between our heroines and another sorority. Passes fly, tops fly off, and, numerous times, the bare-boobed players gather for a huddle with their free-bouncing bosoms dangling smack into the camera.

Truly, this is one sporting contest in which every maneuver scores a two-point conversion and, ultimately, everybody wins.

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10. THE LADY IN RED
NUDE: Pamela Sue Martin
TIME: (0:25)
SCENE: As legendary gangster John Dillinger’s main gun moll, Pamela Sue gets busted and submits to a strip search in the pokie alongside other nude female prisoners.

Pamela Sue Martin was a quizzical choice to embody the female faction on ABC’s 1977 proto-tween sleuth series The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries.

She initially caught the public’s attention as a young survivor in The Poseidon Adventure (1972), and then she co-starred in the down-home B-movie hit Buster and Billie (1974).

By the time she took on wholesome snoop Nancy Drew, Pamela Sue positively oozed a very late-1970s brand of sensuality that automatically suggested mirror balls, pounding beats, blissfully numb sinuses, and no inhibitions whatsoever.

And, in fact, when Playboy made a naked offer, Pam could not refuse. She bared boobs for the mag and got booted from the tube.

Fortunately, movie work eagerly awaited, and Pamela nabbed the title role in The Lady in Red (1979), written by future indie-film guru John Sayles (Lianna, Casa De Los Babys) and Brooklyn-born exploitation great Lewis Teague (Alligator, Cujo).

Pamela portrays a Depression-era farm girl who moves to Chicago, falls into prostitution, does a nude stretch in lock-up, and then becomes the girlfriend of celebrity bank robber John Dillinger.

Repeatedly throughout the shoot-’em-up, Pamela is the lady in nothing. There’s also a topless cameo by racktastic Russ Meyer mamazon Kitten Natividad.

Just as The Bitch led Joan Collins to Dynasty so, too, did The Lady for Pam.

She portrayed wicked brat Fallon Carrington on the first four seasons of the classic prime time soap, until she was replaced in 1985 by Emma Samms (who, to date, has never given us a legitimate nude scene).


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