Annie Sprinkle was born Ellen F. Steinberg on July 23, 1954, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to a Russian-Jewish mother and a Polish-Jewish father. Her family moved to Los Angeles, California when she was five years old, and she lived in Panama from ages thirteen to seventeen. At eighteen, she began working at the ticket booth at the Plaza Cinema in Tucson, Arizona, when "Deep Throat" (1972) was playing. The film was busted, and when Steinberg had to appear in court as a witness, she met and fell in love with "Deep Throat's" director, Gerard Damiano, and became his mistress. She followed him to New York City, where she lived for twenty-two years. Not long after becoming Damiano's mistress, Steinberg began working in porn herself and, at that time, started calling herself "Annie". Her first porn movie was "Teenage Deviate" released in 1975. Perhaps her best known mainstream porn featured role was in "Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle" (co-directed by Sprinkle and sexploitation veteran Joseph W. Sarno) which was the No. 2 grossing porn film of 1981.