Great Read: Can porn star-turned-Bollywood actress Sunny Leone teach India to be cool about sex?

Reporting from Mumbai, India —  For all their bare skin, suggestive dialogue and racy dance sequences, Bollywood movies generally are a marvel of chastity. The world’s biggest film industry is so squeamish about sex that its biggest stars rarely even kiss on screen.

Then there’s Sunny Leone.

Anyone with an Internet connection can watch Leone do a lot more than kiss, and many Indians have. She consistently ranks as the most Googled person in the country, less for her roles in a dozen-odd Bollywood B-movies than for her previous career as one of the biggest porn stars in America.

Working in Los Angeles in the 2000s, she was a Penthouse Pet of the Year, starred in such titles as “Alabama Jones and the Busty Crusade,” created a line of sex toys and launched a production company called SunLust. At the height of her success, she left adult entertainment behind and found an unlikely second act in India, where her parents were born.

Since cavorting onto Indian screens in a reality TV show in 2011, Leone’s deep hazel eyes and endearingly American-accented Hindi have won over fans, if not critics. But it is her past career — and the sexual freedom it represents — that has elevated her to an object of fascination.

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“For someone with my background to cross over to the mainstream, it’s next to impossible,” said Leone, 35.

It seems especially unlikely in India, which is striving to be a sophisticated, modern power but still hews to a buttoned-up public morality. This is the civilization that produced the Kama Sutra, that ancient guidebook to human sexuality, yet today pornography is banned. Cops have been known to arrest couples for making out in public. Sex education in schools is nearly nonexistent, and huge numbers of young people still get married having never laid eyes on their partner.

Enter Leone, who has become something of a national sex ed teacher.

In her early Bollywood movies, relatively low-budget affairs with gossamer-thin story lines, she played exotic, sexually liberated characters — including a porn star, twice. Promoting a brand of condoms called Manforce, she extols the virtues of using protection and undergoing routine STD tests.

Refreshingly direct about her adult film career, she refuses to apologize for what she calls a personal choice, saying she found the women in porn to be beautiful.

“I look at things differently than people do here,” said Leone, sheathed in a floor-length striped dress punctuated by stiletto heels, smiling earnestly across a desk in a Mumbai office. “When I watch a movie, sex and intimate scenes and getting close to someone is the norm. It’s not something abnormal. It happens every day.”

The backlash has been predictable. Some politicians have accused her of threatening Indian culture and even — following one particularly steamy condom commercial — encouraging rape. Many middle-class filmgoers won’t see her movies, and the big-name stars she idolized long kept a polite distance.

But the vast majority of Indians appear to have accepted her.

“She’s part of the sexual revolution in India, where sex is coming out of the closet and people are becoming more curious and accepting of it,” said Ira Trivedi, author of “India in Love: Marriage and Sexuality in the 21st Century.”

“Her timing couldn’t be better. I don’t think people would have received her with the same openness five or seven years ago.”

This year, after a cringe-inducing interview with a talk-show host who asked Leone about fears that she would steal women’s husbands — and wondered if he was being “morally corrupted” by sitting with her — fans, commentators and fellow actors ridiculed the host and praised Leone for responding with grace.

“There are a group of people who don’t agree with my choices and are very vocal and don’t like me,” Leone said. “But I’m very fortunate and I have more people that have been supportive….

“I’m not here to preach anything at all. My goal is, I was given a chance to shoot mainstream cinema. OK, it’s not in English. OK, it’s halfway across the world. But it’s something that I’ve always wanted to do.”

She was born Karenjit Kaur Vohra, to Punjabi Sikh immigrant parents in the Canadian town of Sarnia, on the shores of Lake Huron. A self-described tomboy whose style in those days tended toward mismatched clothes and a unibrow, she played street hockey and loved GI Joes.

But at home with her mother, she watched Bollywood movies and dreamed of stardom.

After her family moved to Southern California when she was a teenager, she studied to become a nurse while looking for a career in modeling. An agent introduced her to the idea of posing nude, and at 20 she made the cover of Penthouse, where she acquired her stage name.

Soon afterward she began shooting hard-core porn under contract with Los Angeles-based Vivid Entertainment, one of the biggest names in the business. Leone describes her leap into X-rated cinema as a business decision by an ambitious young entertainer, telling India’s Filmfare magazine in 2012: “If you’re offered so much money, you tend to get attracted.”

Her conservative parents were mortified, but eventually made peace with her career. In 2008, Leone was on a shoot when her ailing mother took a turn for the worse. Leone raced down the freeways to her bedside in Orange County just a few hours before she died.

When Leone is asked whether she has any regrets — which is often — she usually says she wished her mother and father, who died of cancer less than two years later, had lived to see her become a star in their home country.

In their traditional, close-knit household, she and her brother grew up speaking Punjabi and visited relatives in northern India. Few of those relatives speak with her anymore. In 2011, when she accepted an invitation to join the cast of “Bigg Boss,” a “Big Brother”-style Indian reality show, the producers disclosed her adult-film past to audiences. Her horrified extended family shunned her.

One cousin maintained ties, regularly exchanging texts. But the estrangement still stings Leone.

“I go to Delhi all the time, and I have a masi [maternal aunt] who’s there. It does feel weird not to see her,” Leone said. “It hurts that they’re so close-minded. But I respect their choice.”

Her “Bigg Boss” turn aroused a frenzy. With her husband, business partner and former porn costar, Daniel Weber, acting as her manager, Leone signed on to star in her first feature: a sequel to an erotic thriller whose name translates as “Body.” Reviews noted her “easy screen presence,” but her immigrant Hindi was so shaky that her lines had to be dubbed; one critic said she delivered them “with the concentration of an impassive newsreader rattling off cue cards.”

A second film tanked, and Weber and Leone briefly considered moving back to L.A., to their two rescue dogs and $1.4-million house in the Sherman Oaks foothills.

Those early performances, she acknowledged, were “horrible.” But then she landed a role in a slasher flick that featured a catchy song called “Baby Doll.” A classic Bollywood “item number” — tenuously connected to the plot, but irresistibly danceable at wedding receptions — it showed Leone frolicking in a bathtub, gyrating in a golden cage and oozing a fun, PG-13 sex appeal that established her as a star.

“It made things amazing,” she said.

Now she is everywhere — in the gossip pages for her next movie; hawking Lust, her new perfume; on the cover of a staid business newspaper under the headline, “How Sunny Leone manages her money.”

For a short time this year, she could even be at your bedside. In a clever bit of marketing, Juggernaut Books, a digital publisher, got Leone to write 12 erotic short stories and released them one by one on a mobile app on consecutive nights at 10, targeting Indian men ages 25-40 as they were getting into bed.

Juggernaut founder Chiki Sarkar said readers ate up Leone’s tales of soft-core adventures in distinctly Indian settings: a call center, a budget airline, a small-town movie hall.

“In the last year, Sunny has transitioned from being an ex-adult film star who was on the fringes of Bollywood to an actress who is increasingly getting stronger roles and who has appeared as a very calm, strong and confident woman in the media — a woman who neither denies her past nor is guilt-ridden about it,” Sarkar said.

“She’s become a bit of a girl-power icon.”

Leone doesn’t see herself that way. With three films under contract, she said her only goal is to work every day.

Her Hindi has gotten better, thanks to a coach, and the reviews have marginally improved, too. Critic Uday Bhatia, in a take-down of her recent sex comedy “Mastizaade” (“Fun-lovers”), wrote, “Leone may not be better than this film, but she’s the best thing in it.”

“It takes time to change people’s perceptions,” Leone said. “I feel very fortunate. I’m busy filming into next year. That was my dream. I’m not going to be too worried about what people think of me as long as I get to do what I love.”

shashank.bengali@latimes.com

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