Smouldering Hispanic porn goddess of the 1970s and 1980s Vanessa Del Rio is credited with being a pioneer of the double penetration scene in adult movies and still regularly ranks in top ten biggest clits ever in porn lists. The epic proportions of her legendary love button might have something to do with Vanessa's passion for working out and an, at one time, serious consideration of a switch from porn to a competitive career in female bodybuilding. It could, of course, also have plenty to do with the fact she is renowned as being one of those porn icons who genuinely loved her day job. Vanessa's biographer Diana Hanson says of her: "She was not given the starring roles, because of her ethnicity, and yet she would walk into a premiere and they would just mob her. She was the fan favorite because she was legitimately there for the sex, and that is the ultimate male fantasy, that women will be doing porn for the sex." Vanessa herself, now approaching sixty, still lists one of her favourite pastimes as watching men masturbate via webcam on Yahoo chat.

She was born Ana Maria Sanchez on 31 March 1952 and grew up in Harlem and the South Bronx. Her deeply religious Puerto Rican mother worked in a factory; her Cuban father was a jeweller who believed in strong discipline. Vanessa remembers going to a Spanish movie house on 42nd Street to see The Virgin Goddess, starring Argentinian actress Isabel Sarli, the so-called 'woman no man could possess', at age 14 and thinking I want to be just like her. She's refused to get married or permanently co-habit with boyfriends much of her life ever since. She lost her own virginity at 16 - an event her father happened to walk in on, causing him to stop talking to his daughter and to soon after move out.

Vanessa dropped out of Catholic school and began working at an insurance company, where she ended up bedding the 42-year-old boss. By 19, she was off on the road to a life of petty crime with a boyfriend called Larry the Outlaw. They stole cars and drifting around the states for a couple of years, smoking weed and getting in trouble. Up in New Hampshire the pair were pulled over by a state trooper, and Vanessa had sex with him to get Larry the Outlaw off the hook. He didn't last as her boyfriend much longer.

Heading back home to New York, Vanessa found work as a barmaid and then later as a go-go dancer. She was discovered dancing by a porn agent at age 22 and Vanessa Del Rio was born. Her first adult movie in 1974 featured a then rare double penetration scene which so turned Vanessa on that she says she blew the hippie cameraman during a break. More than 100 X-rated loops and movies were to follow in the next 12 years, firstly casting her in the predictable roles of a maid or hired helped, but later, as she became big porn box office in her own right, as the Latin bombshell star of titles like Viva Vanessa.

"It may sound like a lot of movies, but nowadays, they'll do that many in two years. I didn't like to work all the time because I didn't want to wear out my sexuality and I didn't want to be overexposed," Vanessa recalls. Inducted in to both the AVN and X-Rated Critics Organization halls of fame, since she gave up shooting adult movies in 1986, Vanessa has continued to be a popular draw at adult conventions, written a monthly sex advice column for Belle magazine and still kept her hand in, so to speak, the naughty performer side of the business by giving live X-rated webcam chats for a personally run fansite. She's also become a favourite among rappers, who have even turned her name in to a verb. "She Vanessa Del Rio'ed me" meaning exactly what you'd think it means!