Lisa Deleeuw

Fabulous Redhead

Lisa admits she was not attractive when she was early 20's. "I was overweight and wore my hair like my mothers… when I dropped 40 pounds the whole picture changed… Before I lost the weight, all I had was enormous breasts, they were the only really attractive thing about me. Guys would stare at them, and when they got my top off they'd dive right onto my tits. It made me wish they weren't so big." By the time she was 17 Lisa had also experimented with women, but admits, "It was only one time".

After finishing high school she began working for a used car dealer, while her boyfriend worked in the local adult movie theatre. It was through him that she first became introduced to pornography, but later remembered finding it un-arousing: "I wondered in one day to see what a porn film looked like and practically fell asleep in five minutes." Her life soon changed though as "I got fired because I wouldn't give backseat test drives."

Lisa and her boyfriend decided to move to Los Angeles and start a new life. "I decided that I liked California and I wanted to stay here. It was a lot more expensive than living in Illinois, so I figured that I had to make big bucks quick and modeling sounded like a way to do it… I was eighteen at the time and I just turned nineteen when I started modeling… I started doing girlie modeling in August of 1978." "I didn't know it was going to be nude modeling, but my tits were so big they didn't mind if I was still a little overweight. I was working everyday for a month; then there were so many sets of me at the magazines that I had to look elsewhere. Someone told me I could make good money in porno, so I did a loop… It was the first and only time that a partner had an accident and came inside me too soon. We had to wait a while and do it again… It made me feel good in a way, because the guy was experienced, and he came with me right away."

According to Lisa, she and her boyfriend Doug "had talked about it before, and he said 'Movies are fun, but I don't want you to cheapen yourself by doing something sleazy in the backroom of some dingy hotel'". Under the pseudonym Lisa De Leeuw, she began appearing in numerous hardcore Swedish Erotica loops. She later admitted: "I did come out [to California] with the intention of acting, but not in X-rated films. I'm sure nobody plans on that when they first come out here. It's not one of those life long dreams - 'Oh boy, I want to be a porno star'. I just hit LA, it was there, and I happened to fall into it."

Although Lisa didn't mind having sex in front of the camera, she remembered being quite inexperienced at the time. "I'd only started giving head a year before, so how was I to know that lip service was required when they would bark, "Get the guy up!' Learning how to use garter belts was also a treat. I know even experienced performers who still occasionally will put the panties on under the garter belt, which makes for a good deal of unintentional comedy when you're trying to remove them on camera."

Please visit Lisa Deleeuw Official Commemorative Blog