"Everybody liked Rene Bond," declared film critic and historian Greg Goodsell in Jordan Todorovsky's 2012 documentary Dad Made Dirty Movies (2012). And why shouldn't they? With her toothy smile, apple cheeks, chestnut hair, button nose, and wide brown eyes, she was an accessible and appealing screen presence, the kind of sweet-natured girl you might have had a crush on in high school. Here was your typical small town homecoming queen, only instead of waving to onlookers from the back of a convertible as it cruised down Main Street, Rene Bond was cheerfully disrobing and performing sex acts both real and simulated in motion pictures and on stage. She wasn't pale and drawn, like some of her drug-addled contemporaries in the adult film business. No, she was pert and pink and raring to go. A healthy girl, you might say -- not sexually aggressive in a threatening way (you'd never cast her as a horny Nazi commandant, for instance) but sexually assertive and willing to take the lead in the bedroom. Rene's characters made it seem natural and normal for a woman to seek sexual satisfaction in her relationships. Filmgoers were besotted. So were directors and producers, who hired her again and again throughout the 1970s for hardcore, softcore, and (every now and again) so-called "legit" pictures. Her profile at the Internet Adult Film Database says that she began her career in either 1968 or '69, when she was at that magic age of 18. She was represented in those early days by talent agent and cinematographer Hal Guthu, who remained a friend for the rest of her life. Among her earliest employers was that sultan of schlock, producer Harry H. Novak, who gave her a leading role in one of his beloved "hicksploitation" features, Country Cuzzins (1970). The very next year, of course, Rene's career trajectory would intersect that of Edward Davis Wood, Jr., who directed the vivacious starlet in his lovably ludicrous, self-penned Gothic sex epic Necromania (1971). After that came a series of starring roles for sexploitation kingpin Stephen C. Apostolof. People don't much think of Rene Bond as one of Ed Wood's actors, but the truth is that she was in at least four films that Eddie wrote and/or directed, which puts her ahead of

• Criswell


• Vampira


• Bela Lugosi


• Dolores Fuller


• Paul Marco