# Anora is nothing new – Hollywood has always been obsessed with sex workers

Anora emerged triumphant from last week’s Academy Awards presentation, winning five Oscars including best actress for  for her performance as Ani, a sex worker who elopes with the feckless son of a Russian oligarch, only to find herself at odds with his powerful family and their henchmen. As in his previous films, writer-director Sean Baker shows generosity and affection for the marginalised characters, and especially for its heroine. Even when she gets roughed up, it’s played for laughs and you’re confident she won’t meet one of the sad fates of screen sex workers of yore, such as Louise Brooks as Lulu, stabbed to death in Pandora’s Box, or Vivien Leigh as Myra, who throws herself under a lorry in Waterloo Road.

Madison said in her acceptance speech, “I also just want to again recognise and honour the sex worker community. I will continue to support and be an ally.” However, members of the East London Strippers Collective  by Anora. “We didn’t see any of, like, who she really is as a person,” said Maddie, who went on to admit it was a step in the right direction. “But if they had gone just a little bit further and said: ‘We need full decriminalisation now,’ that could have actually had a much bigger impact.”

But if you want to see more about sex workers’ lives on screen you have only to check out the history of the Academy Awards, first given out in 1929. The original best actress award went to Janet Gaynor for her performance as the “street angel” in Street Angel, with Gloria Swanson nominated the same year for playing a “fallen woman” in Sadie Thompson. In the 97 years of the Oscars’ existence, best actress or best supporting actress awards have gone to actors playing sex workers 16 times, from Elizabeth Taylor in BUtterfield 8 to Jane Fonda in Klute, to last year’s winner Emma Stone, who has a jolly old time working in a Parisian brothel in . And that’s not even counting the nominations for, say, Greta Garbo in Camille, Shirley MacLaine in Irma la Douce or Julie Christie in McCabe & Mrs Miller.



Old professional … Louise Brooks as Lulu in Pandora’s Box. Photograph: Ronald Grant

But such unflinching depictions are a long way from mainstream Hollywood, which prefers its sex workers portrayed as fairytale princesses who have fallen on hard times, exemplified by Pretty Woman, for which Julia Roberts, of course, was Oscar-nominated. It’s an aspirational blueprint: sell yourself on Hollywood Boulevard and you too can snag a millionaire. Having excised the dark elements and downbeat ending of its original script, Pretty Woman has been described as a modern-day Cinderella story. , in turn, has been called the anti-Pretty Woman – though it still manages to be shiny and upbeat, with Ani showing the sort of smiling-through-tears resilience exhibited by Elisabeth Shue in Leaving Las Vegas.

“Sex workers, mostly female but sometimes male as well, were a recurring feature of the New Hollywood in the 1970s, when the Hays Code had given way to so-called sexual liberation, and every movie brat except Steven Spielberg inserted at least one prostitute into their films.”

Sam, another member of the East London Stripper’s Collective, says that, with more people entering sex work these days for economic reasons, “we are already in a culture where I think we are quite destigmatised.” Indeed, as the economy becomes ever more precarious, perhaps sex work will soon be seen as a career more viable than, say, journalism. Kudos to the Academy Awards for showing us the way.

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