[3] Hansen is grandmother to Beck and Marissa's two children, Cosimo and Tuesday, and Channing's son, Aubrey.

[citation needed] Hansen began her professional acting career as a child with the Saranac Lake Summer Theater in upstate New York.

[4] As a teenager in the mid-1960s, Hansen appeared in films by avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas.

After a chance meeting with Andy Warhol, he invited her to collaborate on a film about her recent incarceration in various youth penal institutions.

[6] In the 1970s she appeared as an extra in the Roger Corman film Big Bad Mama, as a dancer in Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise,[7] and in the Odyssey Theater production of The Threepenny Opera directed by Ron Sossi.