Kitten Natividad, star of Russ Meyer’s sexploitation classic Beneath the Valley of the Ultra- Vixens – obituary
Kitten Natividad, the Mexican-American actress, who has died aged 74, was best remembered in mainstream cinema as one of the voluptuous females in Russ Meyer’s cult sexploitation movies.
The former Playboy photographer was credited as the pioneer of “skin flicks” before making his name more widely with the 1970 film Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, about the sex, drugs and back-stabbing of an all-girl rock group.
Kitten Natividad made her Russ Meyer debut in Up! (1976), a film which begins with a man named Adolf Schwartz, a recluse who bears a passing resemblance to Hitler, being murdered when someone puts a piranha in the bathtub at his California home after a dungeon orgy with three women.
The American film critic Roger Ebert, who scripted Up! and other films made by the director, recalled: “Meyer looked at his rough cut, thought the movie needed more breasts and decided to add a nude Kitten ‘as the Greek chorus’.”
The actress was seen in the desert and up trees, reciting Shakespeare and the poetry of Hilda Doolittle (“HD”).
Her recollection was of the challenges posed by location filming with Meyer. “He would direct me and I had all these big, big lines, and he would say, ‘Don’t blink,’ and I was facing the sun and my eyes would get dry.”
She added: “It was uncomfortable making it because I sat on trees that had ants crawling up my ass.”
Kitten Natividad left her husband, George, a wig importer, and began a 12-year relationship with Meyer, who described her as “buxomatically breastastic” and made her the promiscuous and predatory star of his next – and final – movie, Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979).
Before filming, Meyer paid for the actress to have breast enhancement – her second – and brought in a dialect coach, Robert Easton, to help her lose her heavy Mexican accent and learn a Southern drawl.
She was born Francesca Isabel Natividad in Ciudad Juárez on February 13 1948. Her mother, then 16, gave birth to another eight children, but only Francesca’s sister Eva shared the same parents.
When she was 10, her mother married an American senator and moved from Mexico to Texas, where Francesca attended Ysleta High School, El Paso.
Moving to California, she worked as a maid and cook for Stella Stevens, a successful actress and former Playboy Playmate of the Month, and was star-struck when film stars arrived for parties, making her want to make it in showbiz.
In 1969, after a job as an IBM key-punch operator, she took up go-go dancing at Giannoni’s Bar in Pasadena under the name Kitten Natividad. In that capacity, she was seen performing, uncredited, in the 1972 film The New Centurions, a police drama starring George C Scott and Stacy Keach.
She then became a stripper in clubs and on college campuses. By the end of the 1970s, she made her performances more spectacular by bathing in a giant champagne glass to the tune of the Bobby Darin hit Splish Splash.
After her softcore films with Meyer, apart from cameos in Airplane! (1980) and Airplane II: The Sequel (1982), she made several dozen hardcore pornographic productions, first seen topless, then joining in the action.
In 1985, she appeared as a stripper at Sean Penn’s bachelor party on Sunset Strip in Hollywood to celebrate his marriage to Madonna.
Kitten Natividad’s road to baring 44in breasts for the camera had begun with implants at the age of 21. She regretted that and subsequent surgery when, in 1999, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a double mastectomy. It emerged that the silicone used in her original implant was of an industrial, rather than surgical, grade.
She was married and divorced four times.
Kitten Natividad, born February 13 1948, died September 24 2022
