Patti Astor

Patti Astor

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".) ... Source: Article "Patti Astor" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.

  • Title: Patti Astor
  • Popularity: 0.641
  • Known For: Acting
  • Birthday: 1950-01-01
  • Place of Birth:
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Patti Astor Movies

  • 1982
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    Wild Style

    Wild Style

    6.1 1982 HD

    Legendary New York graffiti artist Lee Quinones plays the part of Zoro, the city's hottest and most elusive graffiti writer. The actual story of the...

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  • 1978
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    The Foreigner

    The Foreigner

    5.6 1978 HD

    A French special op suffers an existential crisis as he wanders New York City in search of a mission and the requisite connections.

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  • 1983
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    Bachelorette Pad

    Bachelorette Pad

    1 1983 HD

    Barbie dolls come to life in an underground experimental film

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  • 1980
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    Underground U.S.A.

    Underground U.S.A.

    4 1980 HD

    The Sunset Blvd. of underground cinema, and a suitably ambivalent retrospect on the star-game casualties of New York's upper depths, with Patti Astor...

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  • 1978
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    Rome '78

    Rome '78

    6.4 1978 HD

    Nares mocks up Ancient Rome by shooting in faux-classical sites like Grant's Tomb and Tribeca's American Thread Building, where a decrepit penthouse...

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  • 1979
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    Red Italy

    Red Italy

    4 1979 HD

    Second feature film by the French-born director is a Bertolucci-style story of a bored, rich woman looking for romance and adventure. She meets an...

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  • 1988
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    Assault of the Killer Bimbos

    Assault of the Killer Bimbos

    3 1988 HD

    Two go-go dancers, Lulu and Peaches, are framed for the murder of their employer by the real killer, sleazy gangster Vinnie. Picking up waitress...

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  • 1976
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    Unmade Beds

    Unmade Beds

    4.5 1976 HD

    Sketched loosely, the narrative of Poe's first feature is as scrappy and paper-thin as its protagonist Rico, a self-styled loner in New York City...

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  • 1981
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    Only You

    Only You

    1 1981 HD

    In this ostensible murder mystery, the genre elements are merely a pretext for the series of haunting (if inconclusive and only mildly erotic)...

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  • 2011
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    Blank City

    Blank City

    7 2011 HD

    In the years before Ronald Reagan took office, Manhattan was in ruins. But true art has never come from comfort, and it was precisely those dire...

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  • 1980
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    The Long Island Four

    The Long Island Four

    5 1980 HD

    Based on the true story of four Nazi saboteurs who infiltrated the US in 1942 and were quickly caught and executed, this 80-minute ode to America's...

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  • 1986
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    Forever, Lulu

    Forever, Lulu

    4.3 1986 HD

    When Elaine, an adventurous young woman from Germany, arrives in New York City, she sets out to be a famous writer. After a brief stint at a mundane...

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  • 1978
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    Kidnapped

    Kidnapped

    4.5 1978 HD

    Eric Mitchell's debut film, shot in Super 8, stars Mitchell, Anya Phillips, Patti Astor, and Duncan Smith among a crowd of hip "poseurs," talking...

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  • 1977
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    Snakewoman

    Snakewoman

    1 1977 HD

    Stars Patti Astor as a waylaid heroine fending for herself in the wild, filmed guerilla style in Central Park.

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  • 2023
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    Make Me Famous

    Make Me Famous

    1 2023 HD

    An investigation of Edward Brezinski, an ambitious, charismatic Lower East Side painter hell-bent on sucess, who thwarted his own career with antics...

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  • 1988
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    Assault of the Killer Bimbos

    Assault of the Killer Bimbos

    3 1988 HD

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  • 1975
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    Les Rendez-vous du dimanche

    Les Rendez-vous du dimanche

    6 1975 HD

    A talk show presented by Michel Drucker

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