The short, sad life of Dana Plato

For six and a half seasons in the late seventies and early eighties, Dana Plato was America’s Sweetheart, as one of the stars of a hit family sitcom called Diff’rent Strokes. The country watched her grow up from a precocious 13-year-old girl into a lovely woman. Things got dark in the middle of season six when she developed substance issues and got pregnant. They wrote her out of the show, more or less, sending her figuratively to a farm upstate until a much-ballyhooed series finale in season eight, by which time she had given birth.

When the show’s run was over, work was difficult for her to come by, not because of a lack of talent, but because of her reputation for being undependable. Her drug abuse continued, and she fell into a life of crime, first by robbing a Las Vegas store in 1991. She received only probation for that act, because it was a first offense, because she had used only a pellet gun in the robbery, and because one of her famous friends, a certain Wayne Newton, was a very influential man in Vegas. Unfortunately, she violated that probation the following year when she forged a prescription for narcotics. That led to a 30-day stint in the hoosegow, and mandatory rehab.

The rehab didn’t take, and the job opportunities disappeared. By the mid-nineties, she was living in a trailer and working in retail to pay the bills. The only film work she could get was in low-budget grade-Z films, including erotica like the crap you see below.

In 1999, shortly after she had finished an interview with Howard Stern, which was her big hope to revive her stalled career, she died of an overdose of a painkiller. The coroner ruled her death a suicide because of the vast amount of drugs in her body and her history of past suicide attempts, but the people close to her disputed that vigorously. They said she was actually in an optimistic mood, and that her death occurred simply because she was reckless when it came to drug consumption.

Either way, she was dead at 34.

More details:

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The films:

1989 – Prime Suspect

Although Dana has a lengthy sex scene in Prime Suspect, there’s barely a nip-slip, if that. I think she did this film before she got implants. The two films below are definitely post-implant efforts.

1995 – Compelling Evidence

Compelling Evidence is rated 2.3 at IMDb, lower than The Human Centipede III, Gigli, or the movie version of Cats. That’s about as low as the ratings go. Among all the films ever made, there are only about a dozen rated lower than Compelling Evidence. Nobody reviewed it except Joe Bob Briggs, and his pithy summary was, “I won’t tell you what happens, but lemme put it this way: They won’t be studying these scenes at the Actor’s Studio.” Since Dana had substantial acting experience, she was by far the best actress in these films, but that bar was pretty low, as Joe Bob noted.

1998 – Different Strokes

Different Strokes was just another cheap soft-core film, of the kind that were so common in the nineties, but it was not awful by genre standards. It has some fairly sexy lesbian scenes between Dana and Landon Hall, and its production values made it seem like a James Cameron film compared to Compelling Evidence, which is the very bottom of the barrel.

All of the videos are here.

From the comment section:

She was also in states of undress in two grade Z, low budget films. … She was in Lethal Cowboy (1995) (co-starring Frank Stallone) and The Sounds of Silence (1992) aka Distortions (with Erik Estrada and Todd Bridges).

Along with her bunny mag appearance, of course.