Porn star Marilyn Chambers found dead

One of America's most famous porn stars, Marilyn Chambers, who came to prominence with the notorious 1972 film Behind the Green Door, was found dead on Sunday at her mobile home in Los Angeles. She was 56 and police are awaiting an autopsy to discover how she died.

Chambers was one of the first 'adult film' actresses to become a household name. In doing so, she lost her job as Procter & Gamble's angelic 'Ivory Snow girl': she had appeared for years on the soap box, holding a baby, with the caption "99 & 44/100% pure".

She appeared in David Cronenberg's low-budget horror film Rabid but her reputation after Green Door - in which she had sex with the black actor Johnny Keyes, then taboo - meant she could never break out of porn. In subsequent blue movies, including Insatiable, she partnered the famously well-endowed porn star John Holmes.

During a series of raids on strip clubs in San Francisco in the 1980s, ordered by the then mayor Diane Feinstein, Chambers was arrested in a blaze of publicity while giving a nude performance at a club owned by the team who produced Behind the Green Door. ·