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Anneka Di Lorenzo

Anneka Di Lorenzo’s screen career was brief, provocative and inseparable from the adult-oriented publishing and exploitation-film culture of the 1970s. Born Marjorie Lee Thoreson in Saint Paul, Minnesota, on September 6, 1952, she arrived in Los Angeles while still young and worked as a receptionist, cocktail waitress and topless dancer before establishing herself as a model. After appearing under several names, she began modeling for Penthouse as Anneka Di Lorenzo in 1973. Publisher Bob Guccione subsequently cast her as Messalina in Caligula, which was filmed in Rome in 1976 but did not reach audiences until 1979. It became the defining production of her acting career, though not simply because of its scale or notoriety. Di Lorenzo appeared in unsimulated scenes directed by Guccione against director Tinto Brass’s wishes, and she later said that she used drugs and alcohol to endure them. Her participation made it harder for her to find work in mainstream films after the movie’s release. Di Lorenzo played Messalina twice. While Caligula remained in post-production, its sets and costumes were reused for the Italian comedy Messalina, Messalina! Released in 1977, the film brought her back to the role, this time as its main female character. Her other credits included the 1974 exploitation pictures The Centerfold Girls, Mama’s Dirty Girls and Act of Vengeance. In 1980, she appeared briefly as a nurse in Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill. Her later break with Guccione led to a sexual-harassment lawsuit in which she alleged that he had compelled her to have sex with business associates. She was awarded $4 million before losing the judgment on appeal. It is a difficult but essential part of a career shaped by the complicated overlap between modeling, exploitation cinema and the struggle for control over one’s image. Di Lorenzo died in 2011.