Traci Lords Traci Lords was born Nora Louise Kuzma, on May 7, 1968, in Steubenville, Ohio. Lords endured a tumultuous upbringing, and at age twelve, fled from an abusive and alcoholic father to live with her mother and sisters in California. At fifteen, Lords obtained a fake driver's license indicating that she was twenty-two, which she used to begin acting in adult films under the legal age. At sixteen years old, Lords made her debut in the September 1984 issue of Penthouse, the same issue which exposed Miss America Vanessa Williams’s nude photos. That same year, Lords made her first adult films, What Gets Me Hot! and Those Young Girls. By age eighteen, Lords was an adult film veteran, having appeared in 100 adult films. Her rise in the adult film industry soon came to a halt, however, when she was arrested in 1986 for making porn films underage. The ensuing prosecution of the film company which distributed her videos resulted in the removal of any and all material featuring Lords from store shelves, in order to avoid the risk of prosecution for trafficking child pornography. One film which Lords made after her eighteenth birthday, Traci, I Love You, is the only one of her adult films legally available in the United States.
With her porn career suddenly over, Lords began studying at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute. In 1990, she landed a role in the film Cry Baby, alongside Johnny Depp, Ricki Lake, and Iggy Pop. She went on to appear in other movies such as Blade in 1998 with Wesley Snipes, Black Mask 2: City of Masks in 2002, and Chump Change in 2002 with Jerry Stiller, for which she won a Best Actress Award at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival. On the small screen, Lords has starred on such popular shows as Married... with Children, MacGyver, Gilmore Girls, Will & Grace, Roseanne, and Melrose Place. From 2000 to 2001, Lords had a starring role on Francis Ford Coppola’s sci-fi series First Wave. Lords switched her focus from acting to singing in the 90s, releasing her solo debut, 1000 Fires in 1995. Her most recent release is the 2004 album, Sunshine. In 2003, Lords published her New York Times best-selling autobiography, Traci Lords: Underneath It All. That same year, Lords also wrote and directed a short film called Sweet Pea, which debuted at film festivals in 2005. The film chronicles a teenage girl’s experience with being raped by her boyfriend, which is loosely based on events from Lords’ autobiography.
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