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.
Linda Vargas had been modeling since her teens and already understood the rhythms of studio photography before Playboy entered the picture. Her public image carried a more introspective edge than the magazine’s usual late-1950s exuberance. Playboy portrayed her as someone comfortable spending time alone—walking Chicago’s lakefront, wandering through the Art Institute or sitting in a club listening to jazz rather than constantly seeking company.
Her centerfold was photographed by Herbert Melford and Mike Shea, whose restrained compositions suited that quieter persona. The session favored clean lines and controlled studio presentation over elaborate staging, allowing Vargas’s expression and posture to carry much of the pictorial. The result fit neatly within the increasingly polished photographic language Playboy was developing at the end of the decade.
Modeling remained the principal thread of Vargas’s career afterward. She worked with photographer Peter Gowland, who reproduced numerous photographs of her in his instructional books on photography. That gave her images an unusual second life: they were not merely glamour photographs for magazine readers but examples used to demonstrate photographic technique to other photographers.
Vargas also took occasional bit parts in film and television, though acting never displaced modeling as the clearest part of her public record. She died in 1973 at the age of 34. What survives most strongly is the photographic work itself—a young model whose images continued circulating beyond their original publication and whose Playboy portrait stood out for its unusually reflective mood rather than sheer spectacle.
