Liz Renay, 80; Cult Actress, Stripper and Mobster's Girl

In 1957, she left for Hollywood and met Cohen, who helped her find television roles. She won $1,000 for correctly answering geography questions on Groucho Marx's TV program "You Bet Your Life." She also worked at a charm school.

Mostly she was seen in tabloid pictures sharing intimate glances -- and once, an ice cream sundae -- with Cohen. She also was a fur-adorned presence at trials involving gangland slayings and the tax-evasion case against Cohen. Cohen was accused of laundering money through her. She refused to snitch.

In jail, she wrote a memoir, started a theater group that produced the "Terminal Island Follies" and taught oil painting to inmates. She told Monk Magazine that she pleaded to extend her sentence a few days, explaining, "I didn't want to leave without finishing the murals in the chapel."

After her release, she found a niche playing madams in exploitation films, some pornographic. As a publicity stunt in 1974, she streaked Hollywood Boulevard at high noon. She attracted enormous crowds as well as the attention of the city attorney's office, which charged her with indecent exposure and being intentionally lewd.

She was acquitted by an eight-man, four-woman jury. One male juror asked for her autograph "for his 15-year-old son." Meanwhile, stripper Jennie Lee, who started an Exotic Dancers Hall of Fame, placed Ms. Renay on her 10-best-undressed list.

At trial, her lawyer had passed out pictures of the "crime scene" to promote Ms. Renay's burlesque act.

Ms. Renay also encouraged her daughter, Brenda, to join her onstage. They continued to work together until Brenda killed herself in 1982, on her 39th birthday.

Long settled in Las Vegas, Ms. Renay had been focusing on her writing and planned a new memoir and a recipe book.

Her seven marriages ended in divorce. Survivors include a son from her second marriage, John McLain of Sierra Vista, Ariz.