Michelle Bauer

Bauer was born and raised in Simi Valley, California. She is of Mexican heritage on her mother's side and Czechoslovakian heritage on her father's side.

Bauer was Penthouse magazine's Pet of the Month for July 1981 and also appeared in many other adult magazines during the early to mid 1980s, under a number of different names.

Bauer also starred in the pornographic film Café Flesh (1982) under the name of Pia Snow. She states that she was happy to appear in the film, and on the covers of other films with an X rating, but insisted on a double for the sex scenes. Bauer appeared in several other pornographic titles under her Pia Snow moniker, including Bad Girls (1981), Nightdreams (1981), and others.

Bauer's Penthouse centerfold appearance led to acting for the Playboy Channel and a film try-out for director Fred Olen Ray. Ray liked her audition, and offered her the part if she would be willing to dye her hair black. Her first B movie was The Tomb (1986), it would be the first of many. Along with Linnea Quigley and Brinke Stevens, Bauer became one of the most prominent B movie scream queens in the late 1980s. In addition to multiple films for Ray, she has worked with cult directors David DeCoteau, Jesús Franco and Zalman King and shared the screen with genre stars such as Sybil Danning, Monique Gabrielle, Julie Strain, Lina Romay, George Kennedy, David Carradine, Gunnar Hansen, Paul Naschy and Erik Estrada.

Her life and career are one of the main subjects of the 2011 documentary Screaming in High Heels: The Rise and Fall of the Scream Queen Era by director Jason Paul Collum. She returned for the 2020 follow-up Screaming in High Heels: The Reunion which again reunited her with Quigley and Stevens.

Bauer retained her married name as a screen name. After she and her husband divorced, he filed a lawsuit requesting she not use it for her films. She tried appearing as Michelle McClellan, using the name of her second husband, in Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers (1988), but the press resisted, so she returned to Bauer, which the first husband eventually accepted.