Linne Nanette Ahlstrand Bio
Linne Nanette Ahlstrand was an American actress, glamour and nude model. She was born on July 1, 1936, in Chicago, Illinois, and has also been credited as Linne Ahlstrand. Playboy named her its July 1958 Playmate at 22. Her appearance dates from the magazine's formative 1950s, when the Playmate format was still taking shape.
Ahlstrand had natural breasts, blue eyes and blond hair. Her measurements are 34-23-35.
Linné Nanette Ahlstrand’s Playboy profile turned one personality trait into a running joke: she loved taking life horizontally. Seafood dinners, jazz clubs, foreign films, theater and chess all appealed to her, while hiking, tennis and energetic dancing most certainly did not. Playboy even built the pictorial around that languorous reputation, portraying her as the woman happiest when she could stretch out, relax and let everyone else do the rushing.
Frank Bez photographed her centerfold, capturing that relaxed quality without needing an elaborate concept. Behind the playful “laziest girl in town” label, however, Ahlstrand had considerably more professional ambition than the copy suggested. She had already moved between Hollywood and New York while pursuing modeling and acting, trading the beach-chair indolence of the pictorial for auditions, studio work and the far less restful business of building a screen career.
Film brought several concrete opportunities. Ahlstrand appeared as Natalie in Beast from Haunted Cave, the 1959 horror picture produced by Roger Corman, and took the more substantial role of Diane in Living Venus. Television added another dimension, including work on Johnny Staccato and a recurring part as a dispatcher on Highway Patrol. Those assignments gave her a genuine acting record rather than making Hollywood merely an aspiration attached to a modeling career.
Her tastes remained more sophisticated than frantic. Jazz, foreign cinema, theater and chess fit naturally beside modeling, and even Playboy’s teasing portrait acknowledged that she knew exactly what she enjoyed and saw little reason to pretend otherwise. The joke was that Ahlstrand avoided standing up whenever possible; the reality was that she kept moving professionally between cities, modeling jobs and acting work.
Ahlstrand returned to the Los Angeles area in 1965 and married that September, but she continued working as both an actress and model. Her life was cut short by cancer in January 1967, when she was only 30. The surviving Playboy image preserves the languid persona, while her screen credits tell the other half of the story: behind the woman content to lounge in the sun was a working performer who had no trouble getting up when there was a role worth chasing.
