Controversial porn actor/director Max Hardcore dead at 66

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Porn auteur and actor Max Hardcore was one of the most reviled figures in the seedy world of pornography.

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In a milieu that had sleaze as raison d’etre, Hardcore — real name Paul Little — was among the sleaziest and was even jailed for his porn output.

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Hardcore died Monday from septic shock and pneumonia after a long fight with cancer, according to a business associate. He was 66.

The director of Max Hardcore: Extreme, volumes one through 20, and hundreds of others, his calling card was loops that were degrading even by porn standards.

Business partner Paul Munoz said Hardcore was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in March 2022 and had been receiving radioactive iodine treatment.

“He was almost at the finish line for the chemotherapy,” Munoz said. “He went in and did the surgery and he didn’t want to spend the weekend at the hospital, so he came back home and that’s when things went south for him.

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“His wind tunnel ruptured and air started going into his neck and his neck started swelling up.”

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Munoz added: “And then this past Friday, he suffered some kind of infection in his throat and downstairs. This infection wiped him out because his immune system had not recovered from the last time in December.”

Hardcore had been in the porn business for three decades and performed in more than 500 videos and directed 360 more.

But it was his penchant for perversion that put him on the cops’ radar in 2007. Hardcore and his production company were indicted by a grand jury in Tampa, Fla., for distributing obscene material through the U.S. mail and internet.

Hardcore was sentenced to 46 months in prison in 2008.

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“At the time, most journalists and bloggers saw Little as a victim – a man whose freedom of pornographic expression had been labelled criminal by the U.S. government,” Susannah Breslin wrote in Forbes in 2011.

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But the porn impresario had no regrets, even at the end, Munoz said.

“Max did it his way. He walked the line and didn’t give a f— if he fell off of it or not,” Munoz said. “He knew he had a lot of people who didn’t like him.”

Not everyone is mourning his exit with Hardcore’s typically degrading material being a flashpoint in the war against smut.

Feminist Julie Bindel tweeted: “I don’t believe in evil, but the feeling I got when I was once within hearing distance of this bastard was that I was in its presence.”

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@HunterTOSun