Twenty years ago, a radiant 20-year-old beauty stood center stage at Playboy Mansion West while Hugh M. Hefner introduced her to the assembled media as the 1980 Playmate of the year. A few months later, Dorothy Stratten was the victim of a homicide. For those who came to know her through the pages of Playboy, her death cut short the auspicious career of an actress People magazine described as "so beautiful she seemed luminescent, as if lit from within." That remark rings doubly true, because it describes Dorothy as a person as well. We offer these photos as a tribute to her enduring memory.
Shortly before her death, Dorothy and photographer Mario Casilli began working on a special pictorial suggested by Hef, in which Dorothy takes on the visual personae of legendary blonde sex symbols. In a letter to a close friend written a few weeks before she posed for these photos (published here for the first time), Dorothy said she was "ecstatic" about the project. Louise Stratten, now a Hollywood screenwriter, recalls how excited her sister was. "I'm so glad Playboy is running the pictures from that project," she says. "I feel like she has become something of a mythic figure in the past 20 years." Although with us for only a short time, Dorothy has become a legend.
In one television interview, Dorothy said, "I don't mind being called a sex symbol--why fight it? Why pose nude in a magazine and become Playmate of the Year and not want to be a sex symbol?"
Photographer Mario Casilli, who worked with Dorothy on three pictorials, recalls that "she had some kind of magic quality. I still don't know what it is. I'd be in airports with her and heads would just keep turning."
Actor Eric Roberts, who played opposite Mariel Hemingway in Star 80, one of the films about Dorothy's life, says that if Dorothy had had an opportunity to polish her acting skills, "The possibilities would have been endless. She was an incredible, rare beauty and she definitely would have gone places."
Producer Marilyn Tenser, who chose Dorothy over 300 other candidates as star of the science fiction cult classic Galaxina, recalls: "When Dorothy came in, she was exquisite--and she read very well. She was convinced she was going to be a major star, and she would have been."
Hef, who launched this magazine with the world-famous photo of Marilyn Monroe that Dorothy reprises at right, says of her: "She would have been a major star. She had that presence, in person and on-screen. The camera loved her."
