With a career now spanning over 9 years, almost 250 movies, and a very respectable collection of awards and nominations, Briana Banks is very much hardcore porn royalty. She's worked with Jenna Jameson,Tera Patrick, Rocco Siffredi, Brandon Iron, Peter North and Tawny Roberts to name but a few. And she was one of the very first pornstars to have a sex toy made in her name. If all that doesn't deserve the A List tag then I don't know what does.

A nomadic childhood that saw her born in Germany and live in England for a few years ultimately saw her and her family moving to California when she was 7. She moved out of her mother’s home when she was 16 (her father continued to live in Germany) with her 14 year old sister, and later ended up gaining custody of her sister when she turned 18. Little is known of why Briana took this step, although it is known that she is still in contact with her mother to this day

Briana Banks took on a number of jobs as she attempted to support herself and her sister, working at various times as a pizza chef, a secretary and a file clerk before she entered the industry in August 1999. Prior to this she had done some modelling as a teenager, being a front page model at one point for Teen Magazine, so she had some, albeit rather more innocent, experience in front of the camera. It’s unlikely that those shoots would have prepared her for what was about to follow.


After answering a newspaper ad which was looking for nude models, she ended up instead being asked by the agent for said article if she would be interested in doing a hardcore movie instead. The fact that her partner was Brandon Iron and his notoriously large penis is something that was unlikely to calm her nerves, however he lived up to his reputation as a thoughtful performer and the scene was a positive experience for Briana. She admitted to being rather shaky afterwards, but that soon faded.

For the first year of her career though she wasn not Briana Banks but had instead chosen for herself the name Mirage. But after her first breast enlargement operation in 2000, she opted for a complete change of image and name. No-one would question the decision now as you would presume only a fraction of her fans out there would know her as her old name. But with the change of image also came a change of attitude into an altogether more confident and outspoken performer.

She began to bill herself as having the longest legs in the industry. Certainly, with legs measuring 36" in length, she has at least got to have one of the longest pairs, and there's no doubting that her leggy blonde image is what has won her most of her parts in the industry – she also stands at around 5 foot 10” tall. The change in tact though led to her quickly being named as a Penthouse Pet Of The Month in June 2001 and winning the Hot D’Or for Best New American Starlet at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival

Such a calculated change of direction could have been seen as a step too far by many, but her confidence was well backed up by the movies in which she was starring. Her career best turn to date came in the superb Vegas Or Bust, but this was really only the beginning of an exceptional run of movies and appearances that she would continue to churn out with almost monotonous regularity over the next 7 years or so. The quality never really threatened to let up either.