San Francisco native Susan Damante-Shaw has always been a free spirit as well as a sexy lady. She entered the Miss America Pageant and was first runner-up to Miss California, using the scholarship prize to study acting at The American Conservatory Theater. She was accepted to study further at Carnegie-Mellon University, but didn’t have the funds to attend, so she just decided to go for it without the formal education, landing her first gig as a groupie in The Candidate (1972) with Robert Redford. She popped up in a few series, and did the TV movie The Great American Beauty Contest (1973) with Farrah Fawcett, before landing the part of Rachel Burton in The Student Teachers (1973), where she flashes her big ones and a bit of bush for some clown, literally. The actress made the rounds on some of primetime’s biggest hits, including Emergency!, Dallas, The Rockford Files, Falcon Crest, Ironside, Ellery Queen, and Marcus Welby, M.D. The actress’s biggest break came when she joined the cast of The Adventures of the Wilderness Family (1975) as Pat Robinson. She would reprise the role again for The Further Adventures of the Wilderness Family (1978) and Adventures of the Wilderness Family 3 (1979). Her career slowed down after 1996 to treat Crohn’s disease, and to raise a family—she’s the mom of hottie Vinessa Shaw—but picked up again in 2018 with the movie Spare Room, where she played Geraldine with Virginia Madsen. Thank you, Susan, for allowing a clown to grope you. And for giving birth to Vinessa Shaw.
