Job description: For obvious reasons, this is one of the hardest of show-biz transitions to make. Crossing over from adult film to mainstream cinema is all but impossible. It's difficult to take seriously someone who's bared it all, done it all, and moaned and groaned their way through the technicolour karma sutra. So, when the Porn-Star-Actress-Whatever does cross over, it's generally for the purposes of garnering notoriety for the film in question - so-called 'stunt casting'.
Recently seen in: The House of Wax. In this schlocky horror remake of the creepy 1953 Vincent Price vehicle, director Jaume Serra cast accidental porn star and squillionaire hotel heiress Paris Hilton as one of the prime slices of teen meat to fall foul of the demented proprietor of a waxworks museum. Hilton, her football fanatic boyfriend (Robert Richard) and friends (Chad Michael Murray and Elisha Cuthbert) are driving around on some Florida back roads, headed to a big ball game. The car breaks down, they decide to visit Trudy's House of Wax, and from there - cue the cliches - it's downhill all the way.
Serra can't resist a dig at 'that' videotape, and includes a scene where a friend videotapes Paris' character making out with her boyfriend. Trivia buffs: A sound stage at Warner Bros Movie World on Australia's Gold Coast burned to the ground while testing special effects equipment to be used on the film. Spooky!
Defining moment: Dressed in blood-red lingerie, Paris gets bloodily dispatched by the killer, to the resounding cheers of cinema audiences everywhere. The acting in the heiress' death scene makes her porno performance look like high art.
Most likely to say: 'With me, I'm a brand, and that's how I am. I'm not categorised as one thing. I don't know, people love it!'
Classics of the genre: Porn mega-star Ginger Lynn Allen, one-time squeeze of coke-and-booze addled actor Charlie Sheen, goes mainstream and bobs up next to Charlie's brother, Emilio Estevez, in Young Guns 2. She puts in a creditable performance as Dove, a tart with a heart, but porn connoisseurs would prefer her in The Sperminator. Another leading name in skin-flicks, Marilyn Chambers, features in weirdo auteur David Cronenberg's creepy zombie film Rabid, as a flesh-eating creature with a vampiric phallus hidden in an opening in her armpit.