Biography
Hyapatia Lee: Pride of Her Nation
Born in Haughville, Indiana to teenage parents, Hyapatia Lee became the first Native American (she's three quarters Cherokee) to appear in an adult film. After receiving the crown of Miss Galaxy in 1979, Lee was promptly recruited by the president of the beauty pageant to star in her first porn flick, The Young Likes It Hot (1983), followed by her second film Sweet Young Foxes. The following year, she starred in and scripted, along with her husband, The Ribald Tales of Canterbury, inspired by the canonical text Canterbury Tales by Geoffry Chaucer. In 1991, she won AVN's Award for Best Actress for the film The Masseuse and in 1993, she was inducted into the AVN Hall of Fame.
Porn Is Not the Only Thing Hyapatia Lee's Good At
When she decided to take a break from porn, Lee toured with her band W4IK after their album Double Euphoric was released in 1994, where one of the album's tracks appeared on the music compilation Porn to Rock. Lee has also reappeared on the mainstage, but fully clothed this time, in Coachlight Musical Theater, and has also appeared in several Hollywood films, including The Whacky Adventures of Doctor Boris, Nurse Shirley and Killing Obsession.
As for Her Favorite Film?
"The Ribald Tales of Canterbury, which was one of my very first movies. That was a really big budget movie, over $300,000 and we shot it in Scotland for nine days. It was a takeoff on our childhood Canterbury Tales. We even used the Universal costumes from the musical Camelot in it." Can you imagine if all porn was made with this kind of budget, with that timeframe and exotic locale? Lee can't, and gets nostalgic when talking about the good old days, "When I first got into [porn], everything was shot on film. There was no video. A $70,000 budget movie was cheap. It took three days to shoot, they called it "The Three Day Wonder." About two years after that, video started to be the big contender and everything was shot in video and it became a one day wonder and a $40,000 dollar budget was cheap. Well when I retired from the business a few years ago, it seemed like they were shooting two movies in a day, pretty standardly and a $20,000 budget was pretty much average... It translates in front of the camera. In meaning you have less time to get a good script together, to have a variety of actors and actresses and a variety of sets and types of sexual scenes. You don't have the time to develop your script enough to motivate yourself and make the dialogue realistic."
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