Classically trained ballet dancer, Debra Lamb turned her sights to acting after moving to Los Angeles with her mother and sister. While pursuing her acting career, she dedicated herself to the study of acting and dance, and performed improv comedy. Debra has worked with acclaimed directors Kathryn Bigelow, David Lynch, Katt Shea, Paul Verhoeven, and the iconic John Hughes.
Debra was born in Portland, Oregon on November 24th, 1963. Since early childhood, Debra expressed herself through art, writing, and dance. She wrote children's stories and poetry, as well as illustrating them, and wrote a children's play when she was nine years old. At the age of seven, her mother enrolled her in ballet with the Portland Parks and Recreation Ballet Company, where her love for the theater and performing blossomed. Over the next seven years Debra danced in over a dozen theatrical productions with the company.
In the summer of 1979, Debra's mother moved her and her younger sister to Los Angeles, and despite having a very rough start, at times facing homelessness, found a small guest house for rent in Beverly Hills. Attending Beverly Hills High School later that year was a major culture shock, but she found familiar ground by enrolling in modern dance and drama. It was the following year while attending Santa Monica High School, taking dance and drama classes there, that she firmly made up her mind to pursue an acting career.
Her years right out of high school were faced with many challenges, but she remained determined, and a few short years later became a student at the Van Mar Academy of Motion Picture and Television Acting in West Hollywood, her more famous classmates being Traci Lords and Tommy 'Tiny' Lister. After taking acting classes there for just under three years she moved on, but continued her studies with other acting teachers, including Victoria Wells, for the next several years.
Starting out by doing some modeling, and dancing in a handful of music videos, Debra got her first real break by being cast as a dancer in John Hughes' Un ticket pour deux (1987). A natural comedienne, Debra was chosen from more than a dozen dancers to improvise a scene with John Candy and Steve Martin. The scene was ultimately cut from the film, but that comedic role got Debra her SAG card. Debra went on to perform stand up comedy at The Comedy Store on Sunset Blvd. in Los Angeles and was a member of Sam Longoria's The Wild Side Theater improv comedy troupe in Hollywood.
Debra's exotic features and dancer's physique, along with being adept at comedy and a skilled fire eater, helped her land roles in several low budget horror films during the 80's and 90's, which gained her popularity as an iconic "scream queen" of the era. She was interviewed for many horror genre magazines during that time, such as Femme Fatales, Draculina, Focus, and appeared in Fangoria several times. Debra was given a full page in Playboy's "The Year in Sex: 1988 Reviewed", highlighting her role as Mantra in director Katt Shea's soon to be released Stripped to Kill II: Live Girls (1989), and was subsequently featured in the July, 1991 issue of Playboy.
An accomplished author, Debra's stories have been published in Dark Beauty magazine since its second issue in 2010 to 2015 during her stint as a writer/contributor for the magazine, and in the anthology "Creepies 2: Things That go Bump in the Closet", available on Amazon. Debra is also a screenwriter with several scripts in development.
