Holly Near Nude

Holly Near began her career onstage, in the first nudie musical on Broadway, Hair. In the early '70s she made the transition to TV on such swinging hits as All in the Family, The Mod Squad, and The Partridge Family. She was featured in Slaughterhouse Five (1972) but was put to better use in the hippie love-in The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart (1970), in which she exposed her burning bush--along with every other inch of her womanly body. By the mid '70s she was focusing full time on her political activism through her music and independent record label. An accomplished songwriter and folk singer, her composition "We Are a Gentle, Angry People" appears in "Singing the Living Tradition," the official hymnal of the Unitarian Universalist Association. She returned to the screen, both small and large, briefly in the late '80s for a guest spot on L.A. Law and in Dogfight (1991) and Heartwood (1998), but she's left our hard wood a little softer since her absence. Holly, we prefer you Near.