{"id":2273436,"date":"2026-02-09T03:22:21","date_gmt":"2026-02-09T03:22:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2273436"},"modified":"2026-02-09T03:22:21","modified_gmt":"2026-02-09T03:22:21","slug":"peggy-steffans-actress-and-widow-of-sexploitation-director-joseph-sarno-dies-at-87","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/peggy-steffans-actress-and-widow-of-sexploitation-director-joseph-sarno-dies-at-87\/","title":{"rendered":"Peggy Steffans, Actress and Widow of Sexploitation Director Joseph Sarno, Dies at 87"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

Peggy Steffans<\/a>, who appeared in such 1960s soft-porn movies as The Bed<\/a> and How to Make It!, The Sex Cycle and Come Ride the Wild Pink Horse for her future husband, sexploitation filmmaker Joseph W. Sarno, has died. She was 87.<\/p>\n

Sarno died Friday of respiratory failure at The Mount Sinai Hospital<\/a> in New York, her son, film editor Matthew Sarno<\/a>, told The Hollywood Reporter<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The petite, green-eyed Steffans was often billed as Cleo Nova<\/a> in the movies written and directed by Sarno. She quit acting after they wed in 1970 but continued working with him as an assistant director, costume designer, set decorator, script supervisor, production designer, etc.<\/p>\n

The two were together until his death in 2010 at age 89, with their story captured by Swedish filmmaker Wiktor Ericsson<\/a> in his 2013 documentary, The Sarnos: A Life in Dirty Movies.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat a testimony to Joe\u2019s life and to mine, that the documentary about…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.imdb.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peggy Steffans, who appeared in such 1960s soft-porn movies as The Bed and How to Make It!, The Sex Cycle and Come Ride the Wild Pink Horse for her future husband, sexploitation filmmaker Joseph W. Sarno, has died. She was 87. Sarno died Friday of respiratory failure at The Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2273437,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25177],"tags":[25538,31714,21751,22556,21993,22860,21912,21738,24141,22205,21913],"class_list":["post-2273436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-celebrities","tag-actors","tag-actresses","tag-celebrities","tag-directors","tag-films","tag-hollywood","tag-movies","tag-news","tag-stars","tag-television","tag-tv"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Peggy-Steffans-Actress-and-Widow-of-Sexploitation-Director-Joseph-Sarno.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2273436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2273436"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2273436\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2273438,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2273436\/revisions\/2273438"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2273437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2273436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2273436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2273436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}