Patti Astor — Acting | Biography, Movies & Career

Biography

Patti Astor (born ca. 1950) is an American performer who was a key actress in New York City underground films of the 1970s, and the East Village art scene of the 1980s, and involved in the early popularizing of hip hop. She co-founded the instrumental contemporary art gallery, Fun Gallery.

Patti Astor grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio where she was a charter member of the Cincinnati Civic Ballet. Her adventurous spirit however took her to New York City at the age of eighteen (in 1968) to Barnard College but she soon dropped out to take a leadership role in the anti-Vietnam war group SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). She spent two and a half years as a young revolutionary. At the end of that war she traveled the United States and Europe with her dance act, A Diamond As Big As The Ritz.

Returning to New York in 1975 Astor was in the midst of the storm in New York's legendary East Village, from punk rock at CBGB's, the new wave at the Mudd Club and independent films such as Underground U.S.A. (1980) with directors such as Jim Jarmusch and Eric Mitchell. In 1978, she married Steven Kramer, and artist and a keyboardist for a band called the Contortions.

Astor had studied acting at the Lee Strasberg Institute. A queen of the downtown scene, she appeared in over a dozen experimental and low-budget films. Her entry into this genre was Amos Poe's underground "Unmade Beds" (1976), a black and white 16mm remake of Godard's Breathless which she acted in alongside filmmaker Eric Mitchell, Blondie singer Debbie Harry, and artist Duncan Hannah. She also appeared in such low-budget and low-audience films as Rome '78, The Long Island Four, and Snakewoman. Perhaps the best remembered of these was Eric Mitchell's Underground U.S.A (1980), which she starred in alongside poet Rene Ricard, but none of these films were commercially successful. Her best known roles was as Virginia, the roving reporter, in Charles Ahearn's legendary hip-hop epic, Wild Style. Virginia in Wild Style is a blonde bombshell who encounters the rap and graffiti culture uptown, and introduces it to the downtown art world, a role Patti went on to perform in real life.

These films are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. (Wild Style was voted "one of the ten best rock and roll movies of all time".) ...

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