Marina Ann Hantzis was born in March 14, 1988 in North Highlands, California to a working-class family. Her mother worked for the state of California and her father was and still is a mechanic. Coming from an Irish, Greek and Polish family, her parents divorced when she was 5 years old and was raised by her mom who eventually remarried in 2000. During that time she went to four high schools before graduating, being unhappy in each and every one of them.

She was 17 when she graduated and after that she went to junior college to take classes in film, dance and acting while she waited tables at a stakehouse before saving $7.000 to move to LA to fulfill her dream: become a pornstar. And that’s when the household name of Sasha Grey came to life.

It was May 2006 and the 18-year-old began shooting porn films, mainly toying under the name Anna Karina. Her first appearance as Sasha Grey was an orgy scene with no other than the mighty Rocco Sifredi for “The Fashionistas 2” directed by John Stagliano, where she even told Rocco to punch her in the stomach while he was fucking her.

After such a breakthrough performance, everything skyrocketed for Sasha, rapidly being considered as a potential major star in the business and those who said that were totally on the right track. In 2007 she received two AVN Awards, for Best Three Way Sex Scene and Best Group Scene, as well as being nominated to Best New Starlet. That same year she was named Penthouse Pet of the Month for July.

The next year she became the youngest person to win the AVN Female Performer of the Year award, winning also the Best Oral Sex Scene. All the fame, recognition and accolades came thanks to many things, but mainly, as a journalist of The New York Times puts it, for “the extremity of what she is willing to do and an unusual degree of intellectual seriousness about doing it”. She always defended her sexuality and that she did all those things because she wanted to and because she liked to do them, considering that limiting that freedom of choice for females was one of the flaws of our society.

That intellectual seriousness is what eventually made her quit the industry, after working for the best companies, with the most professional people and achieving everything that’s possible in the porn world. She announced her retirement from porn on April 8, 2011 and left with 253 movie titles to her name with nothing left to do, with a name that transcended the porn world and with a large fanbase that only increased once she reached the mainstream world.

She was still a pornstar when she was featured as an escort in Steven Soderbergh’s “The Girlfriend Experience”, and later on she was also cast in HBO’s show “Entourage” where she played a fictionalized version of herself. In 2010 also featured the thriller “I Melt With You” and acted in an Indonesian and a French movie. 2011 saw her perform in Eminem’s “Space Bound” music video.

But apart from acting, Sasha also works in music, being a singer, guitarist, DJ and performs in the industrial band aTelecine alongside Pablo St. Francis and Anthony D’Juan. If that wasn’t enough, she released a photo book showing another skill of hers that is photography.

So even though she is retired and focused in her mainstream career, we can say that Sasha Grey has opened up a whole new universe for porn actresses, as she managed to make the jump from crazy pornstar to actress and still be respected in both fields. And for all of us, there will always be enough material to keep fantasying about this skinny brunette vixen and all her sexual lust she must still carry with her.