Asia Carrera Performed as a pianist
Asia Carrera Lemmon (born Jessica Steinhauser, August 6, 1973) is an American former pornographic actress.
Carrera's adult film career ran from 1993 to 2003 and included over 400 films and video features.[14] According to interviews, she chose her stage name surname from actress Tia Carrere, changing the spelling for legal reasons.[15]
Carrera was the first Asian performer ever to win the award AVN Female Performer of the Year Award.[16] Carrera retired from the film industry in 2003, following her marriage to Don Lemmon.[2]
Carrera lent her voice to several erotic hentai OVAs for publisher Pink Pineapple, such as Inmu (2001)[17] and Shusaku (1999).[18] In October 2001, Carrera attended the Big Apple Anime Fest in New York City for her voice roles and along with Kobe Tai was an Opening Night Guest of Honor at the fest's Midnight Anime Concourse.[19]
Carrera was also in the 2012 documentary After Porn Ends, which is about life after being a porn actor.
Carrera is an atheist.[6][24] As of November 2014, she wore a colander on her head for her Utah driver's license photograph. State law normally prohibits the wearing of hats in driver license photos, but there is an exception for religious headwear, and Carerra's colander was worn in honor of the religion of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.[1][4] She is one of about a dozen "Pastafarian" Utahns who have worn a colander in their official state ID photos.[25]
In September 1995, Carrera married adult film director Bud Lee. They divorced in 2003, but remain good friends.[2] She married nutritionist and author Don Lemmon on December 19, 2003.[2] The couple moved to St. George, Utah, where she gave birth to a daughter, Catalina, on March 4, 2005, and a son, Devin D'Artagnan, on July 31, 2006, 7 weeks after Asia's husband Don died in a car accident outside Las Vegas, Nevada, on June 10, 2006.[2][26][27][28] In June 2012, she gave birth to a boy that she later placed for adoption.[29]
On April 14, 2010, she confessed on her blog that she became an alcoholic after her husband's death, that she had joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and was in her third week of sobriety. She emphasized that she still did not believe in God, as such a belief is "actually not mandatory for joining AA."[30]
She identified investor Warren Buffett as her hero on her website,[31] which Buffett was pleased to learn.
At the tender age of 13 this daughter of a German father and a Japanese mother already was already playing music by Johann Sebastian Bach on the piano in Carnegie Hall. Thanks to a federal grant she was able to study Japanese language and Economics at New Jersey's Rutgers University, but this was only after she had run away from home as a teenager because of the pressure her demanding parents put on her. By the age of 17 she was homeless. To get through her studies at the university she turned to stripping. After becoming one of New Jersey's best-paid exotic dancers she decided to devote her life to getting richer and richer; she never wanted to live out on the street again. When she heard about girls making thousands of dollars in the porn biz, she moved to Los Angeles. A mutual friend introduced her to director Bud Lee, who instantly put her in one of his feature films. The rest, as they say, is history.