Vanessa del Rio

Born in March, 1952 in Harlem, Vanessa Del Rio AKA Anna Maria Sanchez began doing loops in the early 70s. The Puerto Rican bombshell appeared on the big screen in 1974's Cherry Hustlers while her first big role came in Midnight Desires where she sucks down two cocks at once. Vanessa would do anything. For a magazine shoot, she sucked milk out of a cow's udders. She starred in several loops with Luis Short-Studd, a dwarf, and "set projectors all over America aflame when she let the little fellow slip his fist up her elasticized bunghole." (Adam Film World, 5/80)

A quote from Del Rio - "I'm hotter in real life because the camera isn't going and there aren't any lights. When sex is personal, it's got to be hotter." Anna Maria Sanchez attended Roman Catholic day schools. "One of my chores was to wash, starch and iron the nuns' and priests' vestments. But as a student, I would rather have fun than study. I busted loose in high school. I missed two days in eight years of Catholic school, but on the first day of high school, I was approached by the resident whore. "Wanna cut class?" she asked. That was the beginning of the end."

Sanchez lost her virginity at age 14. "My boyfriend was 18 and a virgin like me. We went to this porno movie house. The manager didn't care how old we were as long as we paid our two bucks. The theater showed triple features, but back then the type of fucking they did was with their underwear on, and usually they were under the covers, not hardcore like today. But it was hot for the times. "We sat in the balcony and my boyfriend pulled his cock out of his pants and wrapped my hand around it and taught me to jerk him off. We did this a few times, and finally we went back to his place when his parents weren't home and fucked our brains out. From that time on, it was fuck, fuck, fuck whenever and wherever I could."

A free spirit, Vanessa spent two years traveling around with a guy in his VW bus. "We were outlaws. I worked as a barmaid and a go-go dancer and that opened me up. Then a friend of mine called me up and asked me if I wanted to go to Sweden on short notice. He said I'd make fuck films at fifty dollars per film and three films a day. "I was so excited and I needed money. I didn't know anything about acting but I sure knew how to fuck. Before I knew it, I was in the movies and I went nuts. I fucked everyone on the set, including the cameraman." In other interviews, Vanessa doesn't sound nearly as enthusiastic about her time in porn, saying that she only did it because her family needed the money. Generally speaking, porn queens, like the rest of us, say what people want to hear.

"I remember there was one small company that used to do loops and were known for wearing out the actors. He would just keep shooting. I saw this girl, just her face, and it was, 'Can we just get out of here?' And it was funny because the camera was behind her so they couldn't see her face and the guy is fucking her from behind and I was looking on because I was behind the scenes. She had the most disgusted look on her face, and the camera couldn't see. She had her chin on her hand, almost strumming her fingers, and she looked totally disgusted. All right already." And the guy's just going at it. And sometimes what happens is that if you do that for too long, the guy can't come. He has a hard-on, but he can't come, because it's so much stop and start that it almost gets stuck on hard-on and the producer would take full advantage of that and just shoot from every conceivable angle to get the all this footage. "The guys have the harder job. A woman can fake it. She puts on high heels and stockings and she can prance around fake being sexy just by looking sexy. With a guy, he has to show that he's turned on. These guys are sex machines. The last time I did sex movies, in 1986, I noticed that the guys balls were smaller than I remembered. That's because they use them so much."

Vanessa Del Rio is a member of the AVN Hall of Fame.