Elsa Sorensen Bio
Elsa Sorensen was a Danish glamour and fitness model, and actress. Born Dane Arden on March 25, 1934, in Copenhagen, Denmark, she has also been credited as Alisa Davis. Playboy named her its September 1956 Playmate at 22. Her appearance dates from the magazine's formative 1950s, when the Playmate format was still taking shape.
Sorensen had natural breasts, blue eyes and blond hair. Her measurements are 38-24-35.
Sorensen relocated to the United States at a young age and, for a period in her career, concentrated on modeling work that included a centerfold photographed by Peter Gowland. Those images favored clean composition and poised posing; contemporary notes and surviving prints emphasize a studied elegance rather than studio spectacle, the kind of picture that rewarded close looking as much as a quick glance.
Her time in front of the camera also crossed into acting. She accepted occasional small parts in both film and television, assignments that relied as much on presence as on dialogue and that kept her intermittently occupied with show-business work beyond editorial shoots. Those screen outings never became a sustained movie career, but they do appear on the margins of her professional record.
Brief as the run was, Sorensen’s photographed work and her handful of screen appearances have kept her name circulating among collectors and readers. The Gowland centerfold in particular survives in reference notes and issue indexes as a compact example of the magazine’s photographic temperament at that moment, a picture that still prompts appreciation from those who study the archive.
