Nora Louise Kuzma aka Traci biography

Real biography: Traci Lords has gone from underage porn princess to mainstream actress to bestselling author. What’s next—governor?

Life Story

Born Nora Louise Kuzma in Steubenville, Ohio, she moved with her mother and three sisters to the Los Angeles area at age 12. At 15, after running away from home, she used a 22-year-old friend’s birth certificate to fake her way into the porn industry. Going by the name Traci Lords, she appeared naked in the September 1984 edition of Penthouse—the same issue that got Vanessa Williams intro trouble, incidentally—and plunged herself into adult movies. Her youthful features and sexual enthusiasm made her an instant star, and by the time she was 18, Traci had shot some 100 films, including Lust in the Fast Lane, Beverly Hills Copulator and Adventures of Tracy Dick: The Case of the Missing Stiff. (In 1986, authorities arrested Traci and forced X-Citement Video to remove her videotapes and magazines from store shelves to avoid being prosecuted for child pornography.)In an attempt to start fresh, Traci began taking acting classes at the Lee Strasberg Institute, and in 1988, she appeared in a remake of Roger Corman’s Not of This Earth. Over the next two decades, she would lend her unique skill set to some 70 movies and TV shows, including Cry-Baby (Amy Locane, Ricki Lake), MacGyver, Married…with Children (Christina Applegate), Gilmore Girls, Will & Grace, Blade (Sanaa Lathan), Roseanne, Melrose Place (Heather Locklear, Josie Bissett, Courtney Thorne-Smith, Marcia Cross) and Virtuosity (Kelly Lynch, Kaley Cuoco). She has even enjoyed a brief singing career, with the youtube-worthy hits “Control” and “Fallen Angel.”Coming up, you can find Traci working with Bill Pullman and Taryn Manning in the sci-fi comedy Your Name Here, and she’ll be spending quality time with her son, Joseph Gunnar, who was born on October 10, 2007. We can only imagine the bedtime stories.