Diora Baird was born April 6, 1983, in Miami, Florida. The all-American beauty left home at the age of 17 when she decided to try her luck in Los Angeles. Despite her gorgeous appearance and traffic-stopping curves, Diora found stardom to be more elusive than she had first imagined.

While going out on auditions, Diora made ends meet by working a litany of low-paying jobs. “I’ve done everything from cater, wait tables, pre-school teacher, painting, to being Cinderella, Elmo, a clown, nanny, selling hair…” Diora recalls. “I would do kid’s parties and entertain and do magic and paint faces and balloon animals. The highlight of my life.”

Fortunately, her hard work soon paid off and Diora began getting a string of high-profile modeling gigs, including a series of ads for Guess. She also enjoyed her first taste of prime-time TV, appearing in a June 2004 episode of The Drew Carey Show. Roles in the low-budget films Brain Blockers (2004) and Deep Down in Florida (2004) soon followed.

Diora’s good looks and increased exposure eventually landed her the highly coveted cover of Play..boy in August 2005. “When I did the magazine I really was not anticipating the kind of response that we got,” she confides. “It was supposed to be a few pages. I didn’t even tell my parents. I didn’t tell anybody. And it turned out to be the cover and all the rest happened.”

“[Play..boy] basically just got my face out there,” she says, “Just like submitting headshots to every producer in town. I think it just gave me more of the stature, more of like a name. The industry’s very fickle like that and political and it just gave me more ‘star power,’ as they call it.”

That “star power” continued with the summer release of Wedding Crashers. The movie may have starred Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn, but it was Diora’s brief bedroom scene that had everyone talking. Ironically, Diora had initally thought the film was too risque.

“I thought it was too much for America,” she says. “I mean, America is so prude. It’s just so conservative. And I was just like, I saw it at the screening and I was like, ‘Oh my god. We’ll be shunned from everywhere. No one’s going to want to make a movie with me ever again.’ And it f—ing did amazing. It did amazing. And I almost didn’t even do it. I almost said no because of the nudity factor. And then I was like, ‘Okay. Let’s just do it.’ And then the rest is history.”

Since it’s release, the film has made over $209 million domestically and over $73 million overseas. More importantly, it’s made Diora even more visible.

After Wedding Crashers, Diora starred in the comedic short, If Love Be Blind (2005) and Hot Tamale (2005), and lined herself up roles in the 2006 films Vegas Baby, Fifty Pills, South of Heaven, Accepted, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning.

From her casting call, the prequel to the legendary The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning promised to be one of Diora’s meatiest roles yet. “Texas Chainsaw Massacre is just one of those movies that’s like a page of history,” she says enthusiastically. “You can’t really go wrong. It’s a prequel. It’s not like number three. Which is really cool, to be the before as opposed to the after. That was really appealing… I just thought it’d be a really fun experience.”

So, will there be more horror movies in the future? “I can’t imagine topping this,” Diora confesses. “I can’t imagine doing like Little House on the Prairie Gone Wrong or something. I really think this will be it.”

Diora Baird will star in Adam Gierasch’s remake of the Night of the Demons as Lily Thompson in February 2010, as well as in two upcoming films about porn stars: the aptly named Pornstar and Love Shack.