Helen (Ann) Wood (actress)
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This article is about the actress also known as "Dolly Sharp." For the actress "Helen Wood" who appeared in Hollywood films in the 1930s and 1940s, see Helen Wood.
She was born on April 25, 1935 in Port Arthur, Texas to Michael Joseph Wood (1899-1962) and Jessie Roberta Wood (1905-1985). She died in Hollywood, California on November 1, 1998 of cancer. She was buried at Calvary Cemetery in Port Arthur.[1]
A child prodigy, she took dance lessons and learned to play the violin with her mother's encouragement, eventually singing and playing when eight years old with Jan Garber's band.[2] As a teenager, she took classes at New York's Julliard School, the Actors Studio, and Agnes de Mille's Dance Theatre while working as a model. In 1949, de Mille arranged for her Broadway debut as a dancer in the musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. In the next few years, she drew notice for her performances in other musicals, including Seventeen and Pal Joey. In 1952, she signed a seven-year contract with 20th Century Fox movie studio.[2]
Her most significant film role at the studio was when she co-starred with Debbie Reynolds and Marge Champion (opposite Kurt Kaznar, Bob Fosse, and Gower Champion) in Stanley Donen's 1953 musical Give a Girl a Break. The film, however, lost money and did not provide the gateway to stardom that Wood had hoped for. She returned to live performances on Broadway and at clubs in Las Vegas, also appearing several times on the Ed Sullivan Show. When her movie contract expired, she became a principal dancer for eight years with the Ballet Corps at Radio City Music Hall. In the 1960s, she danced and toured with the Zigani Ballet. Her last major role in a mainstream film was in William Friedkin's 1968 tribute to the world of burlesque, The Night They Raided Minsky's[2].
By 1970 with a son to raise after her divorce from a marriage, Wood answered an ad from Chick Cochrane, a New York agent for performers in sexploitation films. Taking the name "Dolly Sharp," she performed explicit sex acts in short, 8 millimeter "loop" films. By 1971, she was appearing in feature-length pornographic movies, co-starring with Linda Lovelace in 1972 in Deep Throat. Upset that her relatively low profile as a performer changed dramatically that film became a surprise hit, she left New York in 1974 with her son and worked as a waitress in Winchester, Virginia. She eventully returned to Los Angeles, enduring treatments for cancer, and died in 1998.[2]
Despite her youthful success as a performer, little specific information about her life, either as "Helen Wood" or as "Dolly Sharp," was widely available, and various sources have confused or conflated her with another actress named "Helen Wood," who appeared in MGM films in the 1930s. In the early 2010s Ashley West, who creates podcasts and articles about the adult entertainment industry of the 1960s through the 1980s, conducted research and interviews with people who knew Helen/Dorothy, for the website The Rialto Report, resulting in a 4-part podcast that sheds considerable light on the actress's life and career.
References[edit]
- ↑ "Helen Ann Wood". Find a Grave. November 20, 2009. Retrieved April 17, 2022.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 West, Ashley (December 7, 2014). "Whatever Happened to Deep Throat's Dolly Sharp?". The Rialto Report. Retrieved April 17, 2022.
External Links[edit]
"Helen Wood (VIII) (1935-1998)" at the Internet Movie Database: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2695124/?ref_=nmbio_bio_nm
"Helen Wood" at the Internet Broadway Database: https://www.ibdb.com/broadway-cast-staff/helen-wood-95263
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