Nina Hartley

Hartley was born on March 11, 1959, in Berkeley, California, to a Lutheran father, Louis Hartman, and a Jewish mother, Blanche Hartman (née Gelders), Her grandfather was a University of Alabama physics professor who was a Communist Party USA (CPUSA) party member in the 1930s. Hartley's parents were members of the CPUSA who converted to Buddhism when she was young. Her father was blacklisted in 1957 for his communist beliefs. Hartley grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and as a teenager self-identified as a feminist, influenced by the slogan "my body, my rules". After graduating from Berkeley High School in 1977, she attended San Francisco State University's undergraduate nursing school and graduated magna cum laude in 1985, receiving a Bachelor of Science in Nursing. She was a registered nurse until her license expired in 1986.Hartley sought a career in pornography as a way to make a living by having sex, later telling Las Vegas Weekly, "Porn gave me easy access to women without having to date them or have a relationship." She writes that part of her reason for choosing sex work was to be able to indulge her exhibitionistic and voyeuristic streak. She has said she chose her life's work when she saw the 1976 erotic film The Autobiography of a Flea alone at a theater in San Francisco. In 1982, during her sophomore year of nursing school, Hartley started working as a stripper at the Sutter Cinema and then the Mitchell Brothers O'Farrell Theatre. She told an interviewer that she chose the name "Nina" because it was easy for Japanese tourists to say during the time she was a dancer in San Francisco, and "Hartley" because it was close to her own last name, and she "wanted a name that sounded like that of a real person." Her pornographic film debut was in Educating Nina (1984), where she was cast and directed by fellow performer Juliet Anderson. For many years, she toured the United States and Canada as a stripper and made personal appearances at sex shops. In 2013 she described her father's reaction upon learning about her occupation: He asked, 'Why sex? Why not the violin?' I know now that I'm sexual the way that Mozart was musical [...] a life of public sexuality has, from my very first time on stage, been as natural to me as breathing." In the 1980s and early 1990s, Hartley starred in several of the Debbie Does Dallas film series spin-offs such as Debbie Duz Dishes (1986) and Debbie Does Wall Street (1991). In 1992, she directed her first movie, Nina Hartley's Book of Love. She also produced and starred in a series of sex education videos for Adam & Eve. In 1994, she began her line of instructional videos marketed under the Nina Hartley's Guide brand. She played the part of Hillary Clinton in the 2008 satirical pornographic film Who's Nailin' Paylin?, with Lisa Ann in the role of Sarah Palin. As of 2015, she was still actively performing, and by 2017 had appeared in more than one thousand pornographic films. She has been described by the San Francisco Chronicle as "one of the best-known actresses in the industry" and by CNBC as "a legend in the adult world".