Ilona Staller - Cicciolina

Ilona Staller (complete name Anna Ilona Staller or credited as originally named, Anna Elena Staller, 26 November 1951), also known by her stage name Cicciolina, is a Hungarian-born Italian porn-star turned politician and the first hardcore performer in the world to be elected to a democratic parliament.


Anna Elena, later called Anna Ilona, was born in Budapest, Hungary; her stepfather was an official in the Ministry of the Interior, her mother a midwife. In 1964, she began working for the Hungarian modelling agency, M.T.I. According to her memoirs, she lost her virginity at sixteen with a black university student. (Staller's memoirs were not known to have been translated into English as of early December of 2007.) In her memoirs and in a 1999 TV interview, she claimed that she had provided Hungarian authorities with information on American diplomats staying at a Budapest luxury hotel where she worked as a maid in the late-1960s.

Naturalized by marriage and settled in Italy, she met pornographer Riccardo Schicchi in early-1970s and beginning in 1973, achieved fame with a radio show called "Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?" (French for "Do You Want to Sleep with Me?") on Radio Luna. For that programme, she adopted the name "La Cicciolina," which translates from the Italian as "The Little Fleshy One." (She then moved to other variants, calling her fans "Cicciolini," her teddybear "Cicciolino," and the like.) Although she appeared in several films from 1970, she made her debut under her own name in 1975 with La liceale, whose U.S. title was The Teasers, playing Monica, a lesbian classmate of Gloria Guida. In 1978, on the RAI show "C'era due Volte" her breasts were the first to be seen bared on Italian TV.
Her first film exclusively involving hardcore pornography was telefono rosso, or The Red Telephone, produced by her and Schicchi's company, Diva Futura, in 1983. In her films, she often appeared in group sex scenes with multiple male and female partners, often engaging in such activities such as anal sex, double penetration, and watersports, with some limited scat. In her 1986 film Cicciolina Number One--Horsepower, her counterpart Denise Dior is seen performing fellatio on, and intercourse with, a full-grown male horse, which led to the misconception that it was Staller who performed this sexual act. Although she claims in her memoirs that she had sex with a dog, she herself never engaged in zoosexual activity in any of her films, although in the 1984 film Il Pornopoker she does masturbate with a live snake including inserting the snakes tail into her vagina.



Her memoirs were published as Confessioni erotiche di Cicciolina by the Olympia Press of Milan in 1987. The same year, she appeared in Carne bollente, called The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empress in the US, co-starring John Curtis Holmes. The film would later become a topic of debate when it was revealed that, apparently, Holmes had tested positive for HIV. He eventually died of complications of the disease. 'Cicciolina' starred in her last porn film in 1992.


Staller married American sculptor Jeff Koons in 1991. Koons produced sculptures and paintings of the couple having sex, which were exhibited under the title "Made In Heaven." The marriage broke up in 1992, and their son Ludwig was born shortly afterwards. Staller left the US with the child, and a lengthy custody battle ensued. Koons won custody in 1998 but Ludwig remains with Staller in Italy.

In addition to posing for Jeff Koons, Staller has posed nude as a Playboy Magazine model in diffent countries's editions. Her first appearance in such a magazine was in Argentina in March of 1988; she posed again in this country in September of 1990. Other appearances for the magazine were in Hungary (June 01, 2005), Serbia (July 01, 2005) and in the September, 2005 issue of Mexican Playboy Magazine.


In 1994, she appeared in the cult film Replikator, and in 1996, she had a role in the acclaimed Brazilian telenovela Xica da Silva.

Around the year 2000, she had breast augmentation surgery. The difference can be seen in pictures for an exhibition dedicated to nature and the seasons that took place in Rome in 2006.


Quotes

* "My breasts have never done anyone any harm, while bin Laden's war has caused thousands of victims." — October 2002
* "I once had a huge hang-over, something that poor people will never have. So it's time to help the poor people." — July 2002
* "I am here not showing my breasts. Now I am speaking about poor people so it is not necessary—not because I don't have beautiful breasts ... even now. But it's not necessary showing because poor people have no interest in my breasts." — 2002