Colleen Camp: From Death Game and Apocalypse Now to Clue's Yvette, Hollywood's Most Knowing Bombshell

When I finished writing about Sondra Locke and Death Game, one face from that strange little 1977 thriller stayed with me: the blonde co-star giggling in the hot tub while the evening slowly turns into a nightmare. That was Colleen Camp. Like many film critics of my generation, I carried her around in my head for years without always knowing her name. She was the Playmate in Apocalypse Now, the maid with the impossible corset in Clue and the tough sergeant in Police Academy. Then, decades later, her name turned up again as a producer on Eli Roth's Knock Knock, the remake that brought Death Game back to life with Ana de Armas and Keanu Reeves.

This portrait follows Colleen Camp from 1970s drive-in starlet to one of Hollywood's smartest survivors. It covers her early roles, the only three films in which she says she did nudity, the Playboy myth around Apocalypse Now, the comic sensuality of Yvette, and how she ended up producing the remake of the film that launched her.

How I Met Colleen Camp: A San Francisco Girl, a Macaw Trainer and a 70s Starlet

Category: Biography · Early Career

Colleen Camp was born Colleen Celeste Camp on 7 June 1953 in San Francisco and grew up in California's San Fernando Valley. Before acting she trained macaws at Busch Gardens to pay for college, and then moved into TV guest roles. Her first film lead came in Jack Hill's The Swinging Cheerleaders (1974), and Michael Ritchie's beauty-pageant satire Smile (1975) put her in front of the people who would cast her in Apocalypse Now.

For me, getting to know Colleen Camp was a slow discovery. She is the kind of actress you keep running into: a face in a cult thriller, a scene-stealer in a studio comedy, a name in the credits of a film you had no idea she helped make. Going back through her career in order for this article, I realised how deliberately she built it, and how early it started.

From the San Fernando Valley to Busch Gardens

Colleen Camp young was not the typical starlet discovered at a soda fountain. She grew up in the Valley, and one of her first jobs was working with birds: she trained macaws for the shows at Busch Gardens to earn money for college. It is a detail she has often told with humour, and it suits the performer she became. She was comfortable in front of an audience, quick with timing and never afraid of looking a little ridiculous if it got a laugh.

Television came first. In the early 1970s she worked through guest roles on series such as Marcus Welby, M.D., Happy Days and the miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man, the same training ground that shaped many actresses of her era. Her earliest film credit is Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973), made when she was about twenty.

The Swinging Cheerleaders (1974): Her First Lead

Death Game (1977): Sondra Locke, Seymour Cassel and the Hot Tub

Category: Film Analysis · Cult Thriller

Death Game is a low-budget home-invasion thriller directed by Peter S. Traynor. It was shot in 1974 in about two weeks for around $150,000 and released on 13 April 1977. Colleen Camp plays Donna and Sondra Locke plays her partner in crime: two young women who knock on a married man's door on a rainy night, seduce him and then turn his house into a torture chamber. Seymour Cassel plays the man. The film flopped on release, became a cult item, and was remade twice, most famously as Eli Roth's Knock Knock (2015), which Camp co-produced.

Colleen Camp's Death Game is a film people tend to remember in fragments: the rain, the bathtub, the birthday cake, the screaming. Seen whole, it is a nastier and more unstable film than its reputation as a drive-in curiosity suggests, and Camp, then only about 21, is a big part of why it still unsettles.

The Story: Two Girls, One Rainy Night

Cassel plays George, a successful businessman alone in his comfortable San Francisco-area house while his wife and children are away for his birthday weekend. Two soaked young women, Donna (Camp) and Locke's character, ring the bell asking to use the phone. He lets them in, they flirt, the three end up in the hot tub together, and he gives in. The next morning the girls have no intention of leaving. What begins as a male fantasy becomes a punishment: they wreck the house, tie George up and stage a mock trial for his infidelity.

The film works as a dark mirror of the decade's sex comedies. It takes the fantasy that a thousand drive-in films sold to men and asks what happens when the fantasy refuses to go home. For a 1970s exploitation picture, its point of view is surprisingly ambiguous: the audience is never sure whether to fear the women or cheer them.

Camp and Locke: A Double Act of Menace

Sondra Locke, who was soon to begin her long partnership with Clint Eastwood, gives the colder performance (I covered her side of the story in Sondra Locke: Death Game, Clint Eastwood and the Price of Love). Camp's Donna is the wilder of the two: giggling, childish, sensual one minute and frightening the next. The contrast is the film's engine. Locke seems to plan; Camp seems to improvise, and that makes her less predictable.

Watching it now, what stands out is how fearless she is. This was one of her first real film roles, and it asked her for comedy, seduction and sadism in the same scene. Many young actresses would have played only the sexy surface. Camp plays the character's appetite, which is far more disturbing.

The Hot Tub Scene and the Shoot

The hot-tub seduction is the scene most people search for when they look up Death Game 1977. It is also the hinge of the story: the moment George's resistance collapses and the film's power balance flips. Camp later confirmed that Death Game is one of only three films in which she did nudity, a point I come back to in the critical section on exploitation and consent below.

The shoot itself was not easy. Speaking to Joe Bob Briggs when the film was shown on The Last Drive-In in 2024, Camp recalled the tensions on a fast, cheap production, and how Cassel and Locke, the more experienced actors, looked out for her and guided her through it. That story matters, because it frames her not as a passive starlet but as a young performer learning, quickly, how to protect herself on a set.

From Flop to Cult to Knock Knock

Death Game made little money in 1977, but it refused to disappear. It circulated on television and home video, picked up a cult following, and found a new audience through restorations and screenings for horror fans. In 2015 Eli Roth remade it as Knock Knock, with Keanu Reeves in Cassel's role and Ana de Armas and Lorenza Izzo as the two intruders, and Colleen Camp was one of its producers. She also appears in a cameo as Vivian. Few actresses get to produce the remake of their own early cult film; I return to that unusual second act in the section on her work behind the camera.

Her first starring role came in The Swinging Cheerleaders (1974), directed by Jack Hill, the drive-in specialist who also made the Pam Grier vehicles that defined the decade's exploitation cinema (I wrote about that world in Pam Grier, the drive-in vixens and the 1970s). Camp played Mary Ann Putnam, and the film follows the formula of the cheerleader cycle: campus intrigue, bikinis and pom-poms, with a little more satire than its title suggests.

Many actresses of that period never got out of the drive-in circuit. Camp did, partly because she was already showing a quality the exploitation market rarely asked for: she seemed to be in on the joke. She could play the sexy blonde and, with a glance, let the audience know she understood exactly how the film was using her.

Smile (1975) and the Meeting That Changed Her Career

The next step was Smile (1975), Michael Ritchie's satire of a California beauty pageant, starring Bruce Dern and Barbara Feldon. Camp, then about 21, played Connie, one of the contestants. The film is remembered today as one of the sharpest American comedies of the 1970s about how small towns package femininity, and it is one of the three films in which, by her own account, she did nudity (more on that in the critical section below).

More important for her career, it was on the Smile location that she met producer and casting legend Fred Roos, Francis Ford Coppola's longtime collaborator. That meeting led directly to Apocalypse Now. Before Coppola, though, came a two-week shoot in 1974 that would follow her for the rest of her life: Death Game.

The 70s Exploitation Years: Smile, Death Game, Cat in the Cage and Game of Death

Category: Career · 1970s Cinema

Between 1974 and 1979, Colleen Camp moved through every corner of 1970s American film: drive-in cheerleader comedy (The Swinging Cheerleaders), studio satire (Smile), a cult home-invasion thriller (Death Game), a low-budget thriller (Cat in the Cage), a Bruce Lee film completed without Bruce Lee (Game of Death) and prime-time soap (Dallas). Posters and publicity often sold her as the blonde bombshell, but by her own account she did nudity in only three films: Smile, Death Game and Apocalypse Now.

How the 1970s Packaged a Blonde Starlet

The 1970s were a decade when sex sold films on both sides of the Atlantic. In Europe, actresses such as Nadia Cassini and Edwige Fenech built entire careers on Italian sex comedy. In America, the drive-in market and the new freedom after the Production Code turned bikinis, hot tubs and cheerleader skirts into marketing tools, while the major studios were making the serious films I wrote about in US studio movies of the 1970s.

Colleen Camp lived in both worlds at once. Producers saw a bubbly California blonde they could put on a poster, and the sexy, hot image of Colleen Camp that fans still search for today comes largely from that period's stills and publicity shots. What makes her interesting is how rarely the films delivered what the posters promised, and how much she shaped that herself.

Her Own Words: "Only Three Movies"

Asked about her image on Kevin Goetz's podcast Don't Kill the Messenger, Camp was direct: "I've only done nudity in three movies," naming Apocalypse Now, Smile and Death Game. Of Smile she added that "you didn't see me front on." That statement is the most reliable guide to her filmography, and it corrects a lot of what circulates online, where almost every title from her 1970s and 1980s career is labelled as a nude scene. Most of those films have none. They have sensual or comic moments, flirtation and costume, which is a different thing.

Smile (1975): The Pageant Satire

In Smile, Michael Ritchie's satire of the Young American Miss pageant in Santa Rosa, California, Camp played Connie, one of the contestants. Most of the contestants are teenage characters, and the film's target is the adults around them: the judges, the organisers and the town that turns young women into a product. Camp, who was about 21 at the time, gives one of the film's livelier supporting performances. Its brief nudity, which she describes as discreet, belongs to the film's critique of how the pageant world looks at women, and I discuss it only in that context.

Cat in the Cage and Game of Death

Cat in the Cage (1978) is one of the most obscure titles in her filmography, a low-budget thriller that she made in the same years as Death Game and that is now hard to see. It belongs to the era when a young actress took whatever roles came, and it has no part in the three films she names as her nude work.

Game of Death (1978) is a stranger story. Bruce Lee died in 1973 before finishing the film, and Golden Harvest completed it years later with stand-ins and body doubles. Camp plays Ann Morris, the American singer who is the girlfriend of Lee's character, Billy Lo. Her scenes were shot with a Bruce Lee double, so in effect she was acting a love story opposite a man who was not there. It is one of the oddest credits of any 1970s actress, and it gave her worldwide exposure, especially across Asia and the Middle East, where Bruce Lee films played for years.

Dallas and the Road to Coppola

In 1979 Camp became the first Kristin Shepard on Dallas, Sue Ellen's scheming younger sister and J.R.'s mistress. When the character returned for the famous "Who Shot J.R.?" storyline, the role went to Mary Crosby, so Camp's short run is often forgotten. By then, though, she had already shot the film that would define her 1970s: Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now.

Apocalypse Now's Playmate, the Redux Restoration and the Playboy Myth

Category: Film Analysis · Hollywood History

In Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), Colleen Camp plays one of the Playboy Playmates flown into the Vietnam jungle for a USO show. Most of her role was cut from the 1979 release and restored 22 years later in Apocalypse Now Redux (2001). She was never a real Playboy Playmate or centerfold. In her own words she was an "ersatz centerfold," and the Playboy connection fans search for comes from the film itself and from a later magazine feature.

How She Got the Part

The road to Coppola began on the set of Smile, where Fred Roos, Coppola's casting director and producer, first met her. When Apocalypse Now needed actresses to play the Playmates, Roos thought of Camp. As she recalled in Playboy's oral history of the film, Apocalypse Then, her first reaction was a refusal: she "did not want to do any nudity." It was Cyndi Wood, the real 1974 Playboy Playmate of the Year, who also plays one of the Playmates in the film, together with Roos who persuaded her. Camp replaced Lynda Carter, who had first been attached to the role, and flew to the Philippines.

The production became one of the most notorious in film history: typhoons destroyed sets, the shoot ran for more than a year, and Martin Sheen suffered a heart attack in March 1977. Coppola improvised constantly, and he worked Camp's real past into her character. The girl who had trained macaws at Busch Gardens became a Playmate who talks about her love of birds, a small, odd, human touch in the middle of the madness.

The USO Show and the Cut Scenes

In the 1979 release, the Playmates appear in one of the film's most famous set pieces: a helicopter lands at a riverside base, the girls dance for hundreds of soldiers, and the show collapses into a riot as the men storm the stage. It is Coppola's image of America exporting its fantasies to a war it does not understand. Camp is on screen only briefly, and for 22 years that was all most viewers knew of her role.

Apocalypse Now Redux (2001): The Restored Playmates

When Coppola and editor Walter Murch prepared Apocalypse Now Redux in 2001, they restored about 49 minutes of cut footage. Among them is the episode Camp had shot years earlier: Willard's boat finds the Playmates stranded at a rain-soaked medevac camp, their helicopter out of fuel, and Willard trades fuel for time with the women. Camp's Playmate spends hers with Chef, the crew's nervous cook, in a scene that is sad rather than erotic: two lost young Americans acting out a fantasy neither of them can quite believe in.

For anyone searching for Colleen Camp in Apocalypse Now, this is the scene that matters. It is also one of the three films she names as her nude work, and it shows why she accepted it in the end: in Coppola's hands the nudity is part of the film's portrait of exploitation, not a decoration. I look more closely at that question in the next section.

The Playboy Myth: "An Ersatz Centerfold"

Because of the film, many fans assume Colleen Camp was a Playboy Playmate. She was not. Playboy did feature her in a pictorial tied to her film work, which Wikipedia dates to the October 1979 issue, the season of Apocalypse Now's release. But on Kevin Goetz's podcast Don't Kill the Messenger she explained the real story. She was "never a centerfold," she said, but "an ersatz centerfold": in the film, a photo of her in a black wig replaced a prop centerfold originally made for Lynda Carter, the actress she had replaced.

It is a perfect Colleen Camp anecdote: Hollywood's fantasy machinery, a last-minute substitution, a wig and a fake magazine page, and an actress who remembers it with a laugh. It also explains why searches for "Colleen Camp Playboy" are so common, and why so many of the answers online are wrong.

Exploitation or Drama? Nudity, Consent and Context in Colleen Camp's Films

Category: Critical Analysis · Sex Scenes

Colleen Camp's nude scenes come from only three films, all made when she was in her early twenties: Death Game (shot 1974, released 1977), Smile (1975) and Apocalypse Now (1979, fully seen only in the 2001 Redux). She has said so herself. In Death Game the nudity is exploitation used for satire, in Smile it is brief and discreet, and in Apocalypse Now it is drama: part of Coppola's critique of how the war treated women as entertainment. Her best-known sensual role, Yvette in Clue, has no nudity at all.

The Three Films at a Glance

Film	Director	Her age at filming	Context of the scene	Verdict
Death Game (shot 1974, released 1977)	Peter S. Traynor	About 21	The hot-tub seduction of George, the turning point of the plot	Exploitation used to subvert the male fantasy
Smile (1975)	Michael Ritchie	About 21	Brief and discreet; in her words, "you didn't see me front on"	Satire of the pageant world, not titillation
Apocalypse Now (1979) / Redux (2001)	Francis Ford Coppola	About 23	The stranded Playmate's encounter with Chef at the medevac camp	Drama: part of the film's portrait of exploitation

Death Game: Selling the Fantasy, Then Punishing It

Death Game is the closest Camp came to pure exploitation cinema. It was cheap, quick and sold on the promise of two naked girls in a hot tub. Yet the film uses that promise against its audience. The seduction scene is filmed as the fantasy George has always wanted, and everything that follows is the bill for it. Camp's nudity is therefore not the film's reward but its trap. That does not make the production gentle: it was a rushed, low-budget shoot, and Camp has spoken about the tensions on set and about relying on Locke and Cassel to guide her. Searches for "Colleen Camp nude" usually lead here, but the film's real interest lies in what it does with the scene, not in the scene itself.

Smile: Discretion in a Film About Being Looked At

Smile is a film about the gaze: judges, fathers and sponsors looking at young women and putting a score on them. Its pageant contestants are mostly teenage characters, and Ritchie aims his satire at the adults who run the contest. Camp's brief scene is handled discreetly, as she herself pointed out, and it adds nothing a viewer needs to look for. It is the least significant of her three nude credits and the one most often exaggerated online.

Apocalypse Now: The Refusal and the Persuasion

The most revealing story is the one behind Apocalypse Now. Camp first refused the nudity outright. She changed her mind only after Cyndi Wood and Fred Roos talked her into it, people she trusted, on a film by one of the most respected directors in the world. In the restored Redux scene, the nudity serves the drama: the Playmates have been flown into a war zone as morale boosters, stranded and then traded for fuel, and Camp plays the scene with a sadness that makes the exploitation visible rather than attractive.

Seen from 2026, the story shows how consent worked in 1970s Hollywood: not as a contract clause negotiated with an intimacy coordinator, but as persuasion between people, sometimes kind and sometimes heavy. Camp's account is valuable precisely because it is honest about both her first "no" and her later "yes."

The Verdict: An Actress Who Drew Her Own Line

What separates Colleen Camp from many actresses of her generation is that she stopped. After Apocalypse Now she built her sex appeal on wit, timing and costume rather than nudity, and she has spoken about the subject plainly ever since. The proof came six years later, in a murder mystery with no nude scenes at all, where she became more famous for one corset than for any of her early films: Clue.

Clue's Yvette: Cleavage, Corsets and the Sexiest Joke in a Murder Mystery

Category: Film Analysis · Comedy Sensuality

Colleen Camp played Yvette, the French maid, in Clue (1985), Jonathan Lynn's film of the Parker Brothers board game, produced by Debra Hill. She won the role over Jennifer Jason Leigh, Madonna and Demi Moore after auditioning in a rented French-maid costume. The film contains no nudity. Its humour comes from Michael Kaplan's tightly boned corset and from Lynn's decision to make every character react to Yvette's cleavage. The film made $14.6 million on a $15 million budget and failed at the box office, but it became a cable and home-video cult classic, and Yvette became the role Camp is most loved for.

Of all her performances, Yvette is the one I return to most often, and the one that best explains why I call her Hollywood's most knowing bombshell. Every time I watch Clue again, I notice that the joke is never really on Yvette. It is on the men and women around her who cannot stop looking, and Camp plays that awareness with perfect timing.

Winning the Role: A Rented Maid's Costume

The competition for Yvette was serious. According to Camp's interviews, syndicated from People by AOL, the role was also sought by Jennifer Jason Leigh, Madonna and Demi Moore. Camp's approach was typical of her: she rented a French-maid costume and walked into the audition already dressed as the character. It was a performer's trick from someone who had spent ten years learning that the costume tells half the story.

"The Bosom Is There": Lynn's Comic Strategy

Lynn, the British writer and director best known for Yes Minister, was frank about how he used her. "The bosom is there," he said. "There was no avoiding it." Rather than hide it, he built gags around it. Camp later described his method with admiration: Lynn "used the assets of each person," and the characters around her "react to my breasts." The comedy of Colleen Camp's cleavage in Clue lies in those reactions: Tim Curry's flustered butler Wadsworth, Martin Mull's Colonel Mustard and the rest of the guests each give themselves away by where their eyes go.

That is why the role still works. Yvette is sexy, but she is never simply an object. She is a conspirator with secrets of her own, linked to Miss Scarlet's past and to more than one of the guests, and the film's different endings give her a far darker side than her giggle suggests.

Michael Kaplan's Corsets

The look was designed by costume designer Michael Kaplan, who also dressed Blade Runner and Flashdance. Yvette's uniform was built around a boned corset that shaped her into a cartoon of the French-maid fantasy. Camp remembered it as "so darn tight" that it had to be loosened at lunch. The sexy Colleen Camp image that circulates most online today, the black dress, white apron and pushed-up neckline, comes from this costume, and it is a piece of design as much as a piece of sex appeal.

From Box-Office Flop to Cable Cult

Clue famously opened in cinemas with three different endings, a gimmick that confused audiences, and it lost money. Its second life came on television and VHS. As TCM notes, the film's lack of nudity was one of the reasons it became a cable staple: it could be shown uncut to family audiences who were still laughing at the innuendo. Generations discovered it at home, and when the cast was reunited for the film's 40th anniversary in December 2025, Yvette was still one of the characters fans most wanted to talk about.

For Camp, Clue proved the point her career had been making since the 1970s: she could be the most desirable person in the room and the funniest one at the same time. That double gift carried her through the comedies of the 1980s.

80s Comedy Sensuality: They All Laughed, Valley Girl, Police Academy and the Razzie Years

Category: Career · 1980s Comedy

In the 1980s Colleen Camp became one of Hollywood's most reliable comic supporting actresses. She played the country singer Christy Miller in Peter Bogdanovich's They All Laughed (1981), Robin in the Morgan Fairchild thriller The Seduction (1982), the hippie mother Sarah Richman in Valley Girl (1983) and the tough Sgt. Kirkland in Police Academy 2 (1985) and Police Academy 4 (1987). The Seduction earned her a Razzie nomination for Worst Supporting Actress, and a second came with Sliver (1993). Along the way she moved from bombshell parts to character roles without losing her comic sensuality.

They All Laughed (1981): A Film Under a Cloud

Bogdanovich's romantic comedy, set in New York among detectives who fall for the women they are tailing, gave Camp one of her warmest parts: Christy Miller, a country singer with a good heart and big ambitions. The cast included Audrey Hepburn, Ben Gazzara, John Ritter and Dorothy Stratten. Stratten was murdered in August 1980, after filming ended and before the film was released, and the tragedy hung over it. Camp has spoken about that shadow in interviews, including on the You Might Know Her From podcast. The film flopped on release but is now regarded as one of Bogdanovich's most personal works, and Camp's performance is one of its pleasures.

The Seduction (1982) and the First Razzie

The Seduction was a glossy stalker thriller built around Morgan Fairchild, then television's favourite glamour star. Camp played Robin, the heroine's friend, and the film was mauled by critics. It brought her a Razzie nomination for Worst Supporting Actress, the kind of "honour" that says more about the film than about the actress. Her second nomination, for the Sharon Stone erotic thriller Sliver (1993), came from a similar kind of production: a big, sexy studio film that critics enjoyed attacking.

Valley Girl (1983): The Cool Mom

In Martha Coolidge's Valley Girl, the teen romance that made Nicolas Cage a name, Camp played Sarah Richman, the heroine's mother, a former hippie who runs a health-food shop with her husband, played by Frederic Forrest, her Apocalypse Now co-star. She was barely thirty. It was a sign of where Hollywood was heading with her: from object of desire to the cool, funny adult on the edges of the story, and she played it with relaxed charm.

Police Academy 2 and 4: Sgt. Kirkland

For a wide audience, especially in the countries where the Police Academy films were huge on VHS, Colleen Camp is Sgt. Kirkland. In Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment (1985) she plays a tough officer who falls for the gun-crazy Tackleberry (David Graf), and their romance, two people who find guns erotic, is one of the series' best running jokes. She returned as Mrs. Kirkland-Tackleberry in Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol (1987). The sex appeal here is pure parody: a uniform, a weapon and a straight face.

From Bombshell to Character Actress

By the 1990s the transition was complete. Camp played Mrs. Vanderhoff in Wayne's World (1992), Connie Kowalski in Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995) and a role in Alexander Payne's Election (1999), and much later Brenda in David O. Russell's American Hustle (2013). Few of the drive-in starlets of 1974 were still working with major directors four decades later. Camp managed it by understanding, earlier than most, that a sexy image fades but timing does not. By then she was also building a second career, behind the camera.

Behind the Camera: Producing Knock Knock with Eli Roth and Ana de Armas

Category: Career · Producer

Colleen Camp produced Knock Knock (2015), Eli Roth's remake of Death Game, through her company Camp Grey Productions, and appears in it in a cameo as Vivian. Keanu Reeves took over Seymour Cassel's role, and Ana de Armas and Lorenza Izzo played the two young intruders, the parts originally created by Sondra Locke and Camp herself. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on 23 January 2015, was released by Lionsgate on 9 October 2015, and grossed about $6.3 million on a $10 million budget, before finding a much larger audience on streaming and home video.

From Actress to Producer

Camp's move into producing was not sudden. By the 2000s she was already working on the production side, as co-producer of the Hungarian-American drama An American Rhapsody (2001), starring Nastassja Kinski and a young Scarlett Johansson. She later co-produced The Truth About Lies (2017). For an actress who had spent years watching how films were made from the inside, from a two-week thriller in 1974 to Coppola's year in the jungle, the next step was to control which stories got made.

Why Remake Death Game?

Camp had always believed in the premise of Death Game: a respectable man, a rainy night, two young women at the door, and a fantasy that becomes a trial. Forty years later the idea looked even more modern. The internet, social media and the language of consent had changed how audiences talked about sex, power and punishment. Camp brought the project to Eli Roth, the director of Hostel, who was looking for a thriller with a sharper edge, and they turned the story into a film about a happily married architect, played by Keanu Reeves, whose single night of weakness destroys his perfect life.

Remakes of 1970s films were already a Hollywood habit by then, as I wrote in Hollywood 1970s film remakes: a nostalgic reimagining. What makes Knock Knock unusual is that the remake was driven by one of the original stars, who knew from experience what had worked in 1974 and what had not.

Ana de Armas and Lorenza Izzo: The New Donna and Jackson

For the two intruders, Roth cast his then-wife Lorenza Izzo and a Cuban actress who was not yet famous in Hollywood: Ana de Armas. Her Bel inherits much of Camp's Donna, playful, childish and frightening in turn, and the role became one of the first steps in the career I followed in Ana de Armas: from Havana to Blonde (see also my earlier Ana de Armas portrait). There is something fitting in that chain: the 21-year-old who played Donna in 1974 helping to launch the young actress who would play her for a new generation.

Death Game vs Knock Knock

• The man: Seymour Cassel's George is a middle-aged businessman; Keanu Reeves's Evan is a handsome, younger family man, which makes his fall more surprising.
• The tone: Death Game is raw, chaotic and almost improvised; Knock Knock is polished, with Roth's dark humour and a more controlled cruelty.
• The punishment: both films end with the man humiliated rather than simply killed, but Roth adds a modern twist: the evidence of his night goes online.
• The sex: the 1970s original relies on the hot tub and nudity; the remake is more suggestive, with the erotic charge carried by performance and editing.

Vivian: A Cameo That Closes the Circle

Camp did not cast herself in either of the young women's roles; she was in her early sixties. Instead she appears briefly as Vivian, a family friend, a cameo that works as a private signature. The woman who once rang George's doorbell in the rain now stands on the other side of the door, as one of the people who made the film. Few careers come full circle so neatly, and that is the story I want to close on.

Conclusion: Colleen Camp, the Bombshell Who Was Always in on the Joke

Category: Conclusion

Colleen Camp's career runs from a two-week, $150,000 thriller in 1974 to producing its Hollywood remake 41 years later. In between she was Coppola's Playmate, Bruce Lee's posthumous screen girlfriend, the first Kristin Shepard on Dallas, Sgt. Kirkland in Police Academy and, above all, Yvette in Clue. She did nudity in only three films, drew her own line early, and built a lasting sex appeal on wit, timing and self-awareness.

Writing this portrait, I kept coming back to the same thought: Colleen Camp understood the machinery of Hollywood glamour better than the people who ran it. The posters sold her as a blonde fantasy, but in almost every role she let us see the woman behind the image, laughing at it, using it, and sometimes turning it against the audience, as she did in Death Game. Her frankness about her three nude films, her first "no" on Apocalypse Now and her "ersatz centerfold" is rare among actresses of her generation, and it makes her a valuable witness to how the 1970s treated young women on screen.

For Meeting Venus, she is the perfect example of a sensual actress whose allure has outlived the era that produced it. Fifty years after Smile and forty years after Clue, she is still working, still producing and still the most knowing bombshell in any room. If you came for Yvette's corset, stay for the rest of the career: it is one of the smartest in Hollywood.

Frequently Asked Questions About Colleen Camp

Who played Yvette the maid in Clue?

Colleen Camp played Yvette, the French maid, in Clue (1985), directed by Jonathan Lynn. She won the role over Jennifer Jason Leigh, Madonna and Demi Moore after auditioning in a rented French-maid costume.

Was Colleen Camp a Playboy Playmate?

No. She played a Playboy Playmate in Apocalypse Now (1979), but she was never a real Playmate or centerfold. She has described herself as an "ersatz centerfold," because a photo of her replaced a prop centerfold in the film. Playboy did run a pictorial on her, which Wikipedia dates to October 1979.

How many films did Colleen Camp do nudity in?

By her own account, three: Death Game (shot 1974, released 1977), Smile (1975) and Apocalypse Now (1979), whose scenes were fully restored in Apocalypse Now Redux (2001). Searches for "Colleen Camp nude" often list other titles, but Clue, Police Academy and her other films have no nude scenes.

Who starred in Death Game (1977)?

Death Game, directed by Peter S. Traynor, stars Sondra Locke and Colleen Camp as two young women who seduce and then torment a married man, played by Seymour Cassel. It was shot in 1974 for about $150,000 and released on 13 April 1977.

Is Knock Knock a remake of Death Game?

Yes. Eli Roth's Knock Knock (2015), with Keanu Reeves, Ana de Armas and Lorenza Izzo, is a remake of Death Game. Colleen Camp, one of the original stars, produced it and appears in a cameo as Vivian.

How old is Colleen Camp?

Colleen Camp was born on 7 June 1953 in San Francisco, so she is 73 years old as of October 2026.

Who did Colleen Camp play in Police Academy?

She played Sgt. Kirkland in Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment (1985), where she falls for the gun-loving Tackleberry, and returned as Mrs. Kirkland-Tackleberry in Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol (1987).

Who was Colleen Camp married to?

Colleen Camp was married to film executive John Goldwyn from 1986 to 2001, and they have one child. Her engagement to Garrett Moore was announced in November 2020.