Seka was born Dorothiea Hundley in Radford, Virginia, on 15 April 1954. She maintains, unlike the supposed pornstar stereotype, she had a perfectly happy and normal childhood and upbringing. Nicknamed 'Dottie', she won Miss Hopewell High School and Miss Southside Virginia beauty pageants in her teens. After leaving school, she became part owner of seven adult bookstores in Virginia and Maryland. "At the time 8-millimeter films were the big things. I had to splice them together for the peepshow booths that were in the back of the store. Naturally, I watched the films and I thought to myself, 'These women don’t look that good, and they are not a fair representation of women.' I figured I could do better and I did. I tried hard to show how women should be represented in adult films," Seka recalls.
Telling suppliers she could do better, she moved to Las Vegas and did her first nude photo layout for a magazine, which resulted in a first offer to shoot a sex film loop. Twenty-five at the time, an age when many girls were then getting out of the movies, she jumped at the chance. Her first film as Seka was in the 1978 movie Dracula Sucks (aka Lust At First Bite or Blonde Fire), starring opposite porn stud legend John Holmes. She chose the name Seka after a Vegas girl friend. It means 'little sweetheart' or 'little darling' in Serbo-Croat.
Seka could be said to be the first transition girl porn mega-star, the height of her fame coming at the time when the adult business moved from 8 millimeter to VHS, so that everyone could suddenly have adult films in their own home. She describes the first couple of years as something of a wild time, before she settled down to focusing seriously on the adult business as a career. But to the fans, it was always very clear that Seka was enjoying what she was doing and that became a big part of her attraction. She got dubbed no end of flattering nicknames, from the Platinum Princess to the Marilyn Monroe Of Porn. Pin-up looks, all-natural big boobs and a very excitable clit weren't her only trademarks. Seka was a pioneer of the trend for shaven pubic hair, now something that is almost de rigueur, but it was highly unusual at the time to see a shaven haven on film. She wasn't shy about experimentation either. Seka shot girl-girl, anal, gangbangs and double penetration scenes as happily as she did the regular run-of-the-mill boy-girl stuff. She also appeared under the aliases Lynda Grasser and Sweet Alice.
Her most active movie years were 1980 and 1981, when she starred alone in over 50 movies. The following year, at the height of her fame, she turned her back on making movies for the first time, claiming she wasn't being paid what she deserved. She turned to feature dancing, nude modelling, working on what turned out a ten-year contract as contributor for Club Magazine and developing her own fan club. She directed a couple of movies herself during the late 1980s, and made a brief return to X-rated movies as a star in the early 1990s. She made her last hardcore feature appearance in 1993 in American Garter at the age of 40. Seka's appeared many times since on TV as a passionate supporter for the porn industry. She hosted a weekly Saturday night show called Let's Talk About Sex for a Chicago radio station in 1997, while her cult status for fans not born when she was shooting movies really took off in 2002 when two Swedish film-makers, Christian Hallman and Magnus Paulsson, set about making a critically-acclaimed documentary titled Desperately Seeking Seka. The premise of the movie has the film-makers on a quest to find the porn legend and ask for an interview, while profiling her porn career, seeing it run in to a banning order in Singapore for adult content. But it proved a hit on the international film festival circuit. Director Paul Thomas Anderson has also stated that the character Amber Waves played by Julianne Moore in the movie Boogie Nights was partially based on Seka.
Someone who always knew what she wanted and wasn't afraid to say it, Seka is regarded as one of the pioneers of the strong woman in a previously man's porn world and has long been an AVN Hall Of Famer. She lists her favorite male screen partners as John Holmes, Jamie Gillis and Paul Thomas. Aunt Peg, Kay Parker, Jesse St. James and Candida Royale go down as favorite female screen partners. But her most liked ever is the now director Veronica Hart, who Seka describes as such a sweet woman. The admiration is reciprocated. Veronica has been quoted as saying, "As long as I have a face, Seka has a place to sit." These days Seka, a huge Cubs and White Sox fan, has finally moved from Chicago to Kansas City. But the little spark of the performer still remains. In 2007, then past fifty, she announced to a Kansas City newspaper she had just done her first hardcore scene in nearly 15 years. Oh, and in typical Seka fashion, added that she enjoyed it mighty fine!
