While the 1982 film Paradise a Blue Lagoon rip-off was controversial at the time, given Cates was considered a minor, it certainly put her name on the map, with viewers bewildered by her beauty.
Her strict father was a factory worker, and her mother was a homemaker.
She did however make a small comeback in 2001, but only as a favour to her Fast Times co-star Jennifer Jason Leigh, starring in her directorial debut The Anniversary Party.
The reason this holds reign over so many other more lengthy and gratuitous nude moments is two-fold, it being filmed with a powerful sense of eroticism but also a raw, honest and very deliberately jarring truthfulness.