Pat Lawler Bio
Pat Lawler was an American actress, glamour and nude model. She was born Patricia Joan Lawler on December 29, 1933, in Phoenix, Arizona. Playboy named her its August 1955 Playmate at 21. Her appearance dates from the magazine's formative 1950s, when the Playmate format was still taking shape.
Lawler had natural breasts, brown eyes and black hair. Her measurements are 38-22-36.
Pat Lawler’s pictorial belonged to a particularly busy year for photographer Hal Adams, who shot five of Playboy’s 1955 centerfolds. Adams photographed Lawler on the same studio stool he had used earlier that year for Jayne Mansfield, a small continuity detail from a period when Playboy’s visual identity was still being assembled shoot by shoot. Though Adams considered himself primarily an advertising photographer, his clean studio approach translated naturally to the magazine’s increasingly polished glamour pages.
Lawler’s Playboy appearance was followed by a run of modeling and entertainment work. In February 1956 she was crowned Miss Riviera, and later that year Columbia Pictures signed her to a studio contract. Screen work included an appearance on The Jimmy Durante Show and a role in the low-budget science-fiction feature Invasion of the Saucer Men, placing her briefly within the flourishing cycle of 1950s creature and alien movies.
The studio contract did not turn into a long Hollywood career. By 1958, Lawler was working as a waitress at Casa de Cadillac, even as modeling continued to provide a steadier public presence. She remained in demand for men’s magazines through the late 1950s and into the early 1960s, suggesting that still photography ultimately proved more durable for her than the movie business.
Lawler largely withdrew from publicity afterward and kept her later life private. She died in Oakhurst, California, in 2017 at the age of 83. What remains is a compact but characteristic mid-century career: Playboy, beauty-pageant recognition, a studio contract, a cult science-fiction credit and several more years of glamour modeling before the spotlight quietly receded.
