Billy Dee

Life and career

Born and raised in San Diego, California, Daniels is of mixed ancestry, of Irish, Mexican and African American heritage, one of six children; he has four brothers and a sister. He worked from the age of 11, often on his grandfather's farm milking the cows, and lost his virginity at 14 in a barn, although he did not have sex again until he was 17. By the early 1970s, he began appearing in short 8mm film loops, appearing in the first of them at age 24. By 1978, at age 27, he appeared in his first big-budget porn flick, The Legend Of Lady Blue with fellow porn stars Gloria Leonard and John Leslie.

Daniels had the most prominent part of his career during the second-wave of the so-called Golden Age of Porn from the mid-late 1980's to the early-mid 1990's. In a period when the segregation of pornographic actors on racial lines was a sensitive issue and top female stars were often reluctant in performing with black males, being a very light-skinned African American man ("everyone thought he just had a great tan") and speaking "smoothly", Daniels could pass for white, securing him roles in top-rated pornographic productions with prominent porn stars such as Marilyn Chambers (Marilyn Chambers' Private Fantasies series) and one-time girlfriend Nikki Knights, following his debut with a small role in The Legend Of Lady Blue (1978) and also making him the only African American actor the 1980s top star Traci Lords had performed with. Nevertheless, he could also play roles in productions with explicit black theme such as the porn parody Chocolate C.H.I.P.S. (1988) and Caught from Behind V: Blondes and Blacks (1986), the interracial special release in an anal sex video series. Accordingly, Daniels is today foremost credited as a porn actor who had blurred the colour lines in the American porn industry.

He was inducted into the XRCO Hall of Fame in 2002.

Personal life

Billy Dee had a daughter with a girlfriend in the U.K. and later went on to marry adult actress Suzannah French. Now the grandfather to eight, and great grandfather to two, Daniels shuffles time between his adopted town of Bristol, England and the U.S.