You know you've entered America's subconscious when you get name-checked in The Simpsons. She is rumoured to have a terrific sense of humour. Probably you need one to get your mind round dialogue such as St.Exmin's famous boast of self-sacrifice in Battle Beyond The Stars (1981):"You've never seen a Valkyrie go down!"

Like Adrienne Barbeau, she was into her thirties before a decade's worth of second-rate slasher flicks and porno outings (among more mainstream cameo roles)culminated in Battle, and a shot at the big(ger) time.
The waning, male-dominated 1980s US film industry had no obvious place for the 'female Clint Eastwood' that she was trying to grow into on-screen; her many action and fantasy films of the period seem in retrospect to pre-empt the likes of Xena and Nikita by a full decade. Unfortunately, the reason she had the genre pretty much to herself was that the market wasn't yet ready for the truly empowered female character she depicted.
A Playboy feature and memorable nude scenes in They're Playing With Fire (1984)and the outrageous Howling 2 (1985)consolidated her obvious fan-base, but the Danning-written/produced LA Bounty (1989), in which she kept covered up and gave a very subdued, Eastwood-esque performance as a bounty hunter, was a curiosity and a box-office disappointment.

Though less prominent since a (rumoured)back injury in the early 1990s, she has remained on the A-list for horror film premieres and will reportedly reappear in Ruger: LA Bounty 2. In addition she is now also a producer (1999's "A Dog of Flanders" and the forthcoming "SAS").

SEX APPEAL

A warm sensitivity and vulnerability shows through her all-action persona and her aggressive eroticism ; if any archetype applies, it must be The Witch or Sorceress, the woman of power, but shot through with an accessible streak of neuroticism and insecurity. And, as ever, the conflict of signals invites curiosity and deepens an otherwise easily explicable attraction.