Legend: Tura Satana

TURA SATANA
b. July 10, 1938

One bad-ass babe, Tura Satana was not only a burlesque star for more then 18 years, but was also a cult film actress, most notorious for playing Varla in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!. Performance was in her blood: her father, half Japanese and Filipino, was a silent film actor, while her mother, American Indian and Scottish, was a circus performer. Her family settled in Chicago after some time living in an internment camp in California. Around the age of ten Tura Satana was gang-raped by local boys, who thanks to a rumored pay off to the judge were never prosecuted. Tura Satana spent the next several years training in martial arts and tracking down these boys to exact her revenge. She even founded a girl gang to help protect other young girls in her neighborhood. By 15 she had already had an arranged marriage and divorce under her belt, and had moved to Los Angeles and used a fake ID to become a burlesque dancer. Tura Satana had a love affair with Elvis Presley in the ’50s after he saw her perform at Chicago’s Follies Theater, even rejecting his marriage proposal. According to Satana, Presley even modeled Priscilla Presley’s look off of hers at the time. In 1965 Tura Satana was tapped by Russ Meyers to play the lead in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, a role that she contributed all of her own fighting and stunts to, as well as some of the character’s most memorable lines. In later years Tura Satana survived a gunshot to the stomach by an ex-boyfriend as well as a back-breaking car accident. This legend of burlesque and cult films died of heart failure in 2011.