Patti Astor

Biography Early life and career Patricia Titchener was born on March 17, 1950 and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio,

Actress Astor had studied acting at the Lee Strasberg Institute. A queen of the downtown scene, she appeared in over a dozen experimental and low-budget No Wave films. Her entry into this genre was Amos Poe's underground Unmade Beds (1976), a black and white 16 mm remake of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless which she acted in alongside filmmaker Eric Mitchell, Blondie singer Debbie Harry, and artist Duncan Hannah. She also appeared in such low-budget and low-audience films as Rome '78, The Long Island Four, and Snakewoman. Perhaps the best remembered of these was Eric Mitchell's Underground U.S.A (1980), in which she starred in alongside poet Rene Ricard. Her best known role was as Virginia, the roving reporter, in Charlie Ahearn's hip-hop epic, Wild Style. This tenement storefront gallery, was the first of the 1980s East Village galleries, and specialized in showing graffiti artists, like Fab 5 Freddy, Lee Quiñones, Zephyr, Dondi, Lady Pink, and Futura 2000. It also gave important shows to Kenny Scharf (in 1981), Jean-Michel Basquiat (November 1982), and Keith Haring (February, 1983), artists with a street background who showed elsewhere. For a while the mix of worlds was unique, with the FUN crew of downtown artists and hipsters, beat-boys, rock, movie and rap stars mixing with both neighborhood kids and the official art world: museum directors, art historians and uptown art collectors. The gallery closed in 1985, by which time many other East Village galleries had opened, the interest in graffiti painters in the art world had subsided, and rents in the East Village were rising.

Later life and death After closing Fun Gallery, Astor moved to Hollywood, Los Angeles where she acted in, wrote and produced Get Tux'd starring Ice-T (in one of his first movie roles) and Assault of the Killer Bimbos which People magazine called "Trash Pick of The Week".

Astor died in Hermosa Beach, California on April 9, 2024, at the age of 74.