Eva Norvind (May 7, 1944 – May 14, 2006) was a Norwegian-born Mexican actress, writer, documentary producer and director, sex therapist, and a dominatrix known in BDSM circles. Her birth name was Eva Johanne Chegodayeva Sakonsky. In BDSM history she counts as a public professional who put clinical sex education, erotic power exchange, and media consulting into one practice. The face on screen was only part of the job.
Her father was the Russian prince Paul Vernstad (born Chegodayef Sakonsky). Her mother was the Finnish sculptor Johanna Kajanus, who won the bronze medal for sculpture at the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne. At fifteen Norvind moved to France with her mother and brother. At sixteen she took second prize in the Cannes Film Festival beauty contest and a small role in Saint Tropez Blues. She joined the cast of the Folies Bergère, took the stage name Eva Norvind, and appeared in A School for Scandal at the Comédie-Française. Those early years are biography, not a sexual scene.
Seven Mexican films and a television ban
In 1962 she moved to Canada, then to New York. At eighteen she worked as a Playboy Bunny and danced the can-can. She finished high school in 1964, went to Mexico City to study Spanish, and was recruited as a film actress. She made seven Mexican films, the last of them Báñame mi amor in 1968. On tightly censored national television she publicly defended birth control. The Mexican government ordered her to leave within 24 hours. The National Association of Actors helped her stay, but she was barred from television for a year. On stage she appeared in En el closet, no and in Machiavelli’s La mandragola (The Mandrake).
In 1968 she turned to fashion and celebrity photography and traveled often between Paris and New York. She wrote on film and worked distribution that linked Mexican and Scandinavian cinema. In 1970, in Mexico City, she gave birth to her daughter Nailea Norvind, later a well-known Mexican actress.
NYU, then Taurel Associates
She returned to New York in 1980 and in 1982 earned a BFA in film from NYU. In 1985 she moved her work toward erotic power exchange. Two years later she founded Taurel Associates, an umbrella for counseling, erotic role-play, and health-related video production. She lectured at professional conferences around the world, to clinicians and to general audiences. In 1996 she finished a master’s in human sexuality at NYU.
Thomas Crown, Treut, and Born Without
In 1997 the German filmmaker Monika Treut made the biographical film Didn’t Do It For Love, about Norvind’s life. Norvind also appeared in the 1999 film Tops & Bottoms. That same year director John McTiernan hired her to coach Rene Russo toward a more assertive sexual image in The Thomas Crown Affair, work that earned Norvind a screen credit. She pursued graduate study in forensic psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and gave sexual consultation on the 2003 film Distress.
On May 14, 2006, Norvind drowned off the beach at Zipolite, Oaxaca, Mexico. At her death she was writing, directing, and producing a documentary on the severely disabled Mexican actor and musician José Flores, titled Born Without. The film later won Best International Documentary at FICCO in Mexico City in March 2007, Best Documentary Feature at the Vancouver International Film Festival in 2008, and the Audience Award for Best International Feature at the LA Film Festival in 2009.
Selected credits
Saint Tropez Blues (1961), as a German tourist. Pacto de sangre (1966), as Helen. Esta noche no (1966). Juan Pistolas (1966). Nuestros buenos vecinos de Yucatán (1967). Santo el Enmascarado de Plata vs. la invasión de los marcianos (1967), as Selene. Don Juan 67 (1967), as Helga. Un yucateco honoris causa (1967). Báñame mi amor (1968), as a priestess. Whipped (1998) and The City (2007), as herself.
