Linda Vargas Bio
Linda Vargas was an American actress, glamour and nude model. She was born on April 20, 1939, in Detroit, Michigan. Playboy named her its December 1957 Playmate at 18. Her appearance dates from the magazine's formative 1950s, when the Playmate format was still taking shape.
Vargas had natural breasts, brown eyes and black hair. Her measurements are 35-21-35.
Her centerfold was shot by Herbert Melford and Mike Shea, a pair of hands whose compositions framed Vargas with the quiet clarity that suited 1950s studio portraiture. The session emphasized poise over pose: the images favor a composed line and an unornamented glamour that left room for the model herself to register on the page.
Vargas arrived with a working resume and kept working afterward. Her modeling continued beyond that pictorial, and her collaboration with Playboy photographer Peter Gowland proved especially durable—Gowland used many of her images in his instructional books on photography, a small but telling afterlife for pictures originally made for glossy magazines.
On-screen work was occasional: she turned up in small, bit parts on film and television rather than pursuing a full acting career. For collectors and casual viewers alike, the through-line of Vargas’s public life remained her imagery—studio photographs that circulated into the 1960s and kept her presence in the era’s visual record.
