With a name like Tempest Storm, you expect fireworks — and that’s exactly what she delivered.
Fiery red hair, unapologetic confidence, and a career that stretched across eight decades made her more than just a burlesque performer. She became a legend.
But behind the rhinestones and glamour was a woman who rose from hardship in the segregated South to reign as the undisputed Queen of Burlesque.
From Annie to Tempest
Tempest Storm ruled the stage for more than 60 years — a remarkable journey that began far from glamour, as her childhood was anything but dazzling.
She was born Annie Blanche Banks on February 29, 1928, in Eastman, Georgia, and grew up in a small farming community.
Poverty and abuse defined her early years, and by 14, she had run away from home to escape. She got a job as a waitress in Columbus, Georgia and married a U.S. Marine to legally free herself from her parents. However, the union was annulled only 24 hours later. A year later, at 15, she wed a local shoe salesman whose sister worked alongside her at a hosiery mill.
Reflecting on that second marriage years later in a 1968 interview with Roger Ebert, Storm admitted, “I just left one day. I still had it in my mind to go to Hollywood. I couldn’t get it out of my system.”
By her late teens, she landed in Los Angeles. A casting agent suggested a name that would change her life: Tempest Storm.
”I asked her if she had any suggestions. She said, what about Tempest Storm? I asked her if she had any other suggestions. Well, she said, what about Sunny Day? Well, I said, I guess it might as well be Tempest Storm,” she said.
That name change marked a turning point in her life, setting her on the road to stardom. While working as a cocktail waitress, a customer recognized her charisma and asked if she could perform a striptease.
“I said, ‘What is that?’” Ms. Storm recalled in a 2013 interview with The Quad-City Times. “I was from a small town, I didn’t know. He said it was just dancing, but you take your clothes off. I said: ‘Oh, no, not me. My mother would disown me.’”
