Peggy Steffans, who appeared in such 1960s soft-porn movies as The Bed and How to Make It!, The Sex Cycle and Come Ride the Wild Pink Horse for her future husband, sexploitation filmmaker Joseph W. Sarno, has died. She was 87.
Sarno died Friday of respiratory failure at The Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, her son, film editor Matthew Sarno, told The Hollywood Reporter.
The petite, green-eyed Steffans was often billed as Cleo Nova in the movies written and directed by Sarno. She quit acting after they wed in 1970 but continued working with him as an assistant director, costume designer, set decorator, script supervisor, production designer, etc.
The two were together until his death in 2010 at age 89, with their story captured by Swedish filmmaker Wiktor Ericsson in his 2013 documentary, The Sarnos: A Life in Dirty Movies.
“What a testimony to Joe’s life and to mine, that the documentary about us and our work and our life together should be appreciated and loved as a film,” she said in a 2013 interview with The Telegraph.
Peggy Silverman was born in New York on Oct. 11, 1938. Her mother, Phyllis, was an artist and her father, Matthew, a labor lawyer.
After she graduated from Bayside High School in Queens, she attended Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, and another college in Edinburgh, then studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.
Back in the U.S., Steffans and Shelia Finn played two versions of the same woman in the Adolfas Mekas-directed Hallelujah the Hills (1963) — she went to the Cannes Film Festival in support of the drama — before making it to Broadway in 1964 in The Passion of Josef D., written and directed by Paddy Chayefsky.
Along the way, she became great friends with future Oscar-nominated production designer Polly Platt.
Steffans was working as a waitress when a producer asked her to audition for Sarno; she said she knew he made sex films, but that didn’t bother her. “Because I had this feeling that sex and love did not have anything to do with each other,” she told The Telegraph. “You could have sex without love, and there are many different kinds of sex.”
Steffans then appeared in black and white Sarno films including The Swap and How They Make it (1966), The Love Merchant (1966), The Bed and How to Make It! (1966), The Sex Cycle (1967), Come Ride the Wild Pink Horse (1967), Anything for Money (1967), Bed of Violence (1967), The Love Rebellion (1967), Skin Deep in Love (1967), Scarf of Mist Thigh of Satin (1967) and DeepInside (1968).
She also acted in movies without him, among them A Taste of Flesh, The Touch of Her Flesh, Infidelity American Style and Justine, all released in 1967.
Sarno, who was 17 years her senior, was still married to his second wife when they started living together, she told The Telegraph.
Steffans had begun her behind-the-scenes career as second assistant director on Sarno’s biggest hit, Inga (1964), a Swedish sexploitation film that drew international attention and got him the nickname “the Ingmar Bergman of 42nd Street,” as Stephen Dalton noted in his THR review of A Life in Dirty Movies.
The documentary “paints an affectionate and touchingly romantic picture of Sarno and his wife” as they attempt without success to make one last film.
Dalton described Sarno, who directed more than 100 films, as “an art house auteur of soft-core erotic melodramas, typically written from an emotionally complex female perspective and often addressing the darker side of psycho-sexual neurosis.” Retrospectives of his work played at prestigious European film festivals and cinematheques. He turned to hardcore porn later in his career, often directing under other names.
In addition to her son, survivors include her grandchildren, Tom and Jane; her brother, Steve, and her daughter-in-law, Laura.
