Dana Plato
Nude

Dana Plato had a short, wild ride that even the great philosopher Plato couldn’t make sense of. Dana debuted as a tennis fan in the TV series The Bionic Woman after she passed on the possessed-child role that Linda Blair would eventually play in The Exorcist (1973). Her mom didn’t like the demonic material (although she did let Dana make an uncredited appearance in the 1977 sequel Exorcist II: The Heretic), so it wouldn’t be until Dana landed the part of Kimberly Drummond, the sister of Gary Coleman and Todd Bridge‘s characters, on Diff’rent Strokes that her career took off. Unfortunately, Dana was fired during season six when she became pregnant. Nowadays we would hopefully have more sympathy for this trailblazing hottie, but alas these were tough times for young Dana. Afterward, she struggled to find work and, instead, found trouble: drug use, forging Valium prescriptions, and even robbing a video store. Where else to go but the comforting arms of softcore. Delicious Dana offered some Compelling Evidence (1995) with a topless titty-sucking scene and went every which way and loose with a threesome, skinny dipping, and a lesbian shower rubdown in the porn parody of her childhood television series. It’s called Different Strokes: The Story of Jack and Jill… and Jill (1997) and it’s certainly worth a stroke or two. After appearing on The Howard Stern Show in 1999, where Dana swore she was cleaning up her act, the 34-year-old overdosed. We will miss Dana, but you will not soon be forgotten.