Lynn Turner Bio
Lynn Turner is an American glamour and nude model. She was born on December 1, 1935, in Salinas, California. Playboy named her its January 1956 Playmate at 20. Her appearance dates from the magazine's formative 1950s, when the Playmate format was still taking shape.
Turner has natural breasts, green eyes and red hair. Her measurements are 38-24-37.
Lynn Turner was already comfortable in front of a glamour camera before Playboy entered the picture. During the 1950s she appeared in several other men’s magazines, including Frolic, Jest and Modern Man Quarterly, building the kind of professional ease that made her a natural fit for the increasingly polished pictorial style Playboy was developing in its early years.
Her centerfold was photographed by Peter Gowland, and the session marked the beginning of his long association with Playboy. Gowland’s clean composition and controlled glamour photography gave Turner’s pictorial a more deliberate studio finish than the rougher pinup conventions still common in the period. In retrospect, the shoot stands as an early example of the visual vocabulary he would continue refining for the magazine.
Playboy gave the feature a deliberately playful touch, presenting Turner as if she were ready for a game of backgammon while wearing little more than silver nail polish. The joke was very much of its era, but the photographs themselves depended less on gimmickry than on Turner’s relaxed expression and the composure she had already learned through years of modeling.
Turner’s public record beyond those magazine appearances is comparatively spare, leaving the photographs to carry much of her legacy. What survives is a compact but important place in Playboy’s formative period: an experienced glamour model whose session also introduced one of the photographers who would help shape the magazine’s visual identity for years to come.
