Career
In 1996, to escape their crippling debts, at Franck's suggestion, the couple began working as a couple in pornographic films. In the film L'Indécente aux enfer (1997) she for the first time performed unsimulated sex scenes with other partners. The couple divorced shortly after. After their divorce, Franck quit the pornographic film industry but Karen continued to appear in pornographic films both in Europe and the United States. Lancaume's debut in the United States was in Private Gold 25 - When the Night Falls (Jorgen Wolf, 1997), a Private Media Group production in which Roberto Malone performs one of her first on screen anal penetrations and cum on her mouth. She later worked with European porn film directors, including Mario Salieri, Alain Payet and Luca Damiano, whose films highlighted oral and anal sex, double penetrations, lesbianism and orgies.
Her appearances alternated between the two continents, whether in the ranks of major producers like Elegant Angel, Wicked Pictures and Sin City, or to be under acclaimed directors like Marc Dorcel, Mario Salieri, Andrew Blake, Alain Payet, Alessandro Del Mar, Luca Damiano, and others.
She collaborated in Exhibitions (John B. Root, 1998), a pornographic film shot as a documentary on the porn scene, which combined interviews with the protagonists. Lancaume came to feel distaste for her work, even in an interview saying: "I was covered in spunk, wet, freezing to death and no one even offered me a towel. When the scene ends, you are worthless."
In 1999, she exhibited at the Cannes Film Festival and met Virginie Despentes, who was seeking actresses to perform explicit unsimulated sex in her first film Baise-moi (Fuck Me, Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi, 2000). In addition to Lancaume, Raffaëla Anderson, another French porn actress, was also chosen. The controversial film is based on the novel by Virginie which narrates the encounter between Nadine (Karen) and Manu (Raffaëla) and her subsequent flight, transformed into a vengeance against society and the male gender. The director defines her debut as a feminist argument in the style of Thelma and Louise but with real sex scenes, rape and murder. With the scandal from the film came notoriety, and Raffaëla decided to use the pull to pursue a career in mainstream film while Karen started easing her workload compared to previous years and eventually abandoned the pornographic industry in 2002 after six years in the business.
Read more about this topic: Karen Lancaume
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“I seemed intent on making it as difficult for myself as possible to pursue my “male” career goal. I not only procrastinated endlessly, submitting my medical school application at the very last minute, but continued to crave a conventional female role even as I moved ahead with my “male” pursuits.”
—Margaret S. Mahler (1897–1985)
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Work-family conflicts—the trade-offs of your money or your life, your job or your child—would not be forced upon women with such sanguine disregard if men experienced the same career stalls caused by the-buck-stops-here responsibility for children.”
—Letty Cottin Pogrebin (20th century)