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Leslie Bovee
Leslie Bovee worked in American adult film through the second half of the 1970s, when the business still sold tickets at a box office and printed its stars on posters. Her credits also carry a French spelling, Leslie Dubuex.
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The 1970s gave American adult film its one stretch of mainstream attention. Features were shot on 35 mm, reviewed in daily newspapers, screened in cinemas that kept box offices and printed posters, and staffed by people who had come out of theatre and art school. The business had a star system, and a star was expected to act: carry a plot, deliver lines, hold a close up, and only then take her clothes off. It was a strange, brief arrangement, and the films that survive from it are watched now as documents of a moment when the form was trying to be respectable.
Leslie Dubuex is the second spelling, and it has the look of distribution paperwork rather than of a second identity. A francophone surname on a title card made a print easier to place in French speaking markets, where a dubbed track and a translated title would follow. Names travel by sea and get respelled at the dock. What results is a performer who exists in two alphabets at once: the domestic poster and the export print, the same body under two labels. A viewer searching one spelling finds the other only if the catalogue happens to link them, which is why both are worth typing.