BURLESQUE STRIPPER PERFORMED FOR DECADES

Tempest Storm, one of the most celebrated strippers of midcentury burlesque, who continued plying her craft until she was in her 80s — not because she had to, but because she could — died on Tuesday at her home in Las Vegas. She was 93.

Routinely named in the same ardent breath as the great 20th-century ecdysiasts Lili St. Cyr, Blaze Starr and Gypsy Rose Lee, Storm was every inch as ecdysiastical as they, and for far longer. Almost certainly the last of her ilk, she was, at her height in the 1950s and early ’60s, famous the world over, as celebrated for her flamered tresses as for her vaunted 40-inch bust.

“Everything you see,” Storm proudly told an interviewer in 1975, “is all mine.”

Playing burlesque stages in New York, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, the Bay Area, London and elsewhere, she was reported to earn $100,000 a year in the mid-1950s (the equivalent of about $950,000 today). Her breasts were said to be insured with Lloyd’s of London for $1 million.

Visiting the University of Colorado in 1955, Storm precipitated a riot among male students — by doing nothing more than removing her mink coat.

She was seen by still wider audiences in midcentury burlesque performance films, including “Striptease Girl” (1952); “Teaserama” (1955), ; and “Buxom Beautease” (1956).

More recently, she was featured in the documentaries “Behind the Burly Q” (2010) and “Tempest Storm” (2016).

Along the way she acquired four husbands and many lovers, among whom she said were John F. Kennedy (“He was a great man in everything he did,” she said) and Elvis Presley (“He really was the King”), while losing, night after night, her mink, gloves, gown, pearls and hat — though retaining her G-string and fishnet bra, and with them her virtue.

“I think taking off all your clothes — and I’ve never taken off all my clothes — is not only immoral but boring,” Storm told The Wall Street Journal in 1969. “There has to be something left to the imagination.”