Sandra Edwards Bio
Sandra Edwards was an American glamour and nude model. She was born Sandra Lee Edwards on March 12, 1938, in Los Angeles, California. Playboy named her its March 1957 Playmate at 18. Her appearance dates from the magazine's formative 1950s, when the Playmate format was still taking shape.
Edwards had natural breasts, blue eyes and brown hair. Her measurements are 36-20-36.
Her Playboy centerfold was shot by Peter Gowland, a photographer whose polished, studio-friendly compositions were a common sight in 1950s men's magazines. The magazine credit sits alongside a small but distinct footnote in the record: her name is often spelled Saundra Edwards in contemporaneous clippings and credits, a variant that appears in many of the same trade listings that circulated her images.
Before and after the pictorial she worked the other side of the business: Edwards took the stage as a Las Vegas showgirl while also appearing in other men's magazines of the era. That combination of glossy stills and live spectacle was an ordinary route for models of the decade, and it placed her squarely in the entertainment circuits that linked pinup work with nightclub employment.
Her private life became public in a far darker register. Edwards married actor Tom Gilson on December 8, 1961, and the couple separated in August 1962 amid reports that he had become abusive; she moved in with her sister and brother‑in‑law. On October 6, 1962, when Gilson broke into the house where she was staying, Edwards shot and killed him with a shotgun. The episode abruptly interrupted a career that had moved from centerfold pages to the Vegas stage, leaving a brief but complicated public record.
