Liz Renay

Pearl Elizabeth Dobbins (Liz Renay), model and actress: born Chandler, Arizona 16 April 1926; seven times married (one son, and one daughter deceased); died Las Vegas, Nevada 22 January 2007.

Liz Renay was a cartoon character come to life, a buxom, peroxide sex goddess, a more knowing, cult version of Britain's Barbara Windsor or Diana Dors. Her image was a blurred Warholian screenprint of celebrity and sensation. Her early vaudeville existence as a burlesque stripper and gangster's moll, however, was eclipsed by her reinvention via the perverted cinematic lens of John Waters, perhaps America's most acute ironist-auteur and, according to William Burroughs, the "Pope of trash".

By the time he met her, Renay had already lived a life "filled with adventure and insanity", recalled Waters, which "read like a script from one of my own films". She was born in Arizona and raised by religious parents, only to run away from home to win a Marilyn Monroe lookalike contest. In Las Vegas she became a showgirl and brassière model, and, eventually, girlfriend to the mobster Mickey Cohen - albeit one with a taste for painting and poetry.

Her complicity with the Mafia resulted in her prosecution for perjury, after she refused to testify against other gangland figures. "I didn't want to end up in the East River," she explained. As a consequence, she spent over three years, from 1959 to 1962, in Terminal Island Prison in California - cashing in on her notoriety by selling her paintings for $5,000 a piece, and recording and broadcasting her poetry readings.

"In jail Liz fought off the lesbians and began writing her autobiography," Waters recorded in his own book, Shock Value (1981). The book, originally entitled "Headlines and Heartaches", appeared as My Face for the World to See (1971), and to promote it, the 47-year-old actress ran down Hollywood Boulevard stark naked. "There were four thousand people there," she recalled. "There were little old ladies out there yelling, 'Atta girl, baby! Do your thing!' " Once more Renay found herself before a judge and jury, charged with indecent exposure. When she was acquitted, one of the jurists asked her for her autograph - for his 15-year-old son, so he claimed.

Renay continued to star in a series of sexploitation movies, with such titles as The Thrill Killers (1964), Lady Godiva Rides (1969) and Blackenstein (1973). Then she was cast by Waters in his 1977 film Desperate Living. Set in the fictitious Mortville - a criminal Utopia presided over by Queen Carlotta (played by Edith Massey) - Renay played Muffy St Jacques, "an oversexed murderer accused of smothering her baby-sitter in a bowl of dog food". ("Just shove my face in it," the actress pleaded wearily, after the umpteenth take).

At the time of her "rediscovery" by Waters, Renay had been playing a stripclub in a remarkable act with her 27-year old daughter, Brenda. "I especially loved the fact that this mother-daughter team obviously owned only one pair of show heels between them," said Waters. "When one would leave the stage after stripping down to a G-string, she'd take off the silver spikes and the other would slip them on before continuing the act."

Yet for all her hard-bitten exterior, Renay seemed "extremely gentle, even romantic". "My kind of guy is Italian and wears shiny suits," she told Waters one day. "Everybody thinks it's so awful I've been married seven times, but they don't realise I marry all my love affairs." "She was the happiest person I knew," said Waters, "bizarrely happy. People really liked her. I think her type was a hit man."

In 1992 she published another volume of memoirs, My First 2,000 Men, among whom she counted Jerry Lewis, Glenn Ford, Burt Lancaster and Cary Grant.

Waters kept in contact with his starlet:

I always visited her when I went to Las Vegas. I remember her telling me she'd just made another movie. "Oh really," I asked her, "what was that?" "Corpsegrinders II," she said. "Where did you make it?" "In my bedroom," she said.

Philip Hoare