Linda Lovelace

On April 23, 2002 she was taken off life support and died in Denver, Colorado. Una Merkel has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her contributions to Motion Pictures, at 6230 Hollywood Boulevard. On April 3, 2002, she sustained severe injuries in a car accident in which her sport utility vehicle rolled over. She died in Los Angeles, California. Boreman testified before congressional committees investigating pornography and also gave lectures on college campuses and elsewhere, always decrying what she described as callous and exploitative practices of the pornography industry. Her final film role was in the 1966 Elvis Presley film Spinout. According to Boreman's 1980 autobiography Ordeal, the couple's relationship was plagued by violence, rape, prostitution and, of course, pornography. She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Summer and Smoke (1961).

Traynor went on to marry and guide the career of Marilyn Chambers, another major porn star. She made a comeback as a middle aged woman playing mothers and maiden aunts, and in 1956 won a Tony Award for her role in The Ponder Heart. For many years after the film debuted, Boreman claimed that her husband, whom she divorced in 1973, had forced her into pornography at gunpoint and that in Deep Throat itself bruises from his beatings can be seen on her legs. Her career went into decline during the 1940s and although she continued working it was in less prestigious productions. However, several 8 mm "fetish" loops that still circulate confirm the assertions. She played Ann Rutledge in the 1930 film Abraham Lincoln and during the 1930s became a popular second lead in a number of films, usually playing the wisecracking best friend of the heroine. Over the years she was sometimes accused of having made zoophilia pornography before Deep Throat, a charge that she always denied. She returned to Hollywood and achieved her greatest success with the advent of "talkies".

Boreman maintained that she herself was not paid for her work in Deep Throat and that her husband, Chuck Traynor, received only $1,250 (1972 US dollars) for it even though the film would eventually gross an estimated $600 million. She appeared in several films during the silent era but spent most of her time in New York working on Broadway. After becoming famous she starred in several soft core movies, which were flops. Born in Covington, Kentucky, Merkel resembled the popular actress Lillian Gish, and her resemblance allowed her to enter films in 1920 as Gish's double in the film Way Down East. The daughter of a policeman, Boreman made several hard core short features before making Deep Throat, perhaps the most financially successful porn movie ever. Una Merkel (December 10, 1903 – January 2, 1986) was an American film actress. She later became an advocate against pornography and insisted on using the name Boreman.

Linda Boreman (January 10, 1949 - April 23, 2002) became famous as a pornographic actress under the stage name Linda Lovelace in the 1972 film Deep Throat.