Biography
From a Polaroid sent to a magazine office to two Hall of Fame inductions: the life of Cara Lott, told from the record.
Cara Lott was born on August 6, 1961, in Huntington Beach, California, and grew up there in a middle-class Catholic family. The Pacific was part of daily life; she surfed, swam in open water, dived, kayaked, hiked, camped, skied and fished well into adulthood.
Her adult career began by accident. At 18, looking for money toward college tuition, she asked a friend to photograph her in lingerie on top of the family piano and mailed the Polaroid to Hustler’s reader section. Hustler Studios called her in for an interview, and within about six months she was the centerfold and cover subject of the December 1981 issue.
The shoot led her to the World Modeling Agency in Sherman Oaks, a licensed nude-modelling and talent agency, and she was posing for adult magazines that same week. Her magazine portfolio of the period included Club, Velvet, High Society, Genesis and Cheri.
Within a few months of her first magazine work she moved into films, among them Sweet Young Foxes, Taboo II, Frisky Business, Trashy Lady and Night Prowlers. The 1980s kept her busy on two tracks: features for nearly every studio of the videotape era, and feature dancing at gentlemen’s clubs across the United States, Canada and Japan.
In 1984 she took a small part in Brian De Palma’s Body Double, credited as Pamela Weston for the role of “Girl in Bathroom #2”. Her own account also lists 52 Pick-Up (1986) and some R-rated Japanese productions. AVN’s obituary later noted that she had worked at least once for almost every producer who put out a videotape in the 1980s and early 1990s.
She stepped away from the industry in 1991 and went back to college, completing a qualification in Health Sciences. A second round followed in 1997 and 1998 with six more adult films, which by her own count brought her close to 300 titles.
In January 2005 she began a third phase as a self-described “40+ model” and MILF performer, appearing on the cover of and inside titles such as Girls Over 40, 40 Something and Forty + Magazine, and in Naughty America’s My Friend’s Hot Mom series. Vivid’s Flasher followed in 2006, the year both the AVN Hall of Fame and the Legends of Erotica Hall of Fame inducted her; in 2008 she was an AVN Awards nominee for Best Oral Sex Scene for that film.
Her final adult credits came in 2009, and in 2013 she was named among the veteran performers who turned up at the Protecting Adult Welfare Bare Bowling fundraiser. Cara Lott died on March 19, 2018, in Orange County, California, aged 56. AVN published an obituary the following day; there was no public memorial service.
Ginger Lynn remembered her as kind and funny; Tom Byron recalled her blue eyes; Amber Lynn called her “one of the unsung legends of our time”. Her sister told AVN that she had been very independent and a real entrepreneur.