Ellen Stratton Bio 
Ellen Stratton was an American actress, glamour and nude model. Born Bonnie La Rue Nix on June 9, 1939, in Marietta, Mississippi, she has also been credited as Bonnie La Rue Miller and Bonnie Miller. Playboy named her its December 1959 Playmate at 20. She was later named Playmate of the Year 1960. Her appearance dates from the magazine's formative 1950s, when the Playmate format was still taking shape.
Stratton had natural breasts, blue eyes and blond hair. Her measurements are 35-20-35.
Ellen Stratton arrived at Playboy with a professional life already well removed from the usual glamour circuit. For more than two years she had worked as a legal secretary at a prominent West Coast law office, a job that demanded organization, discretion and more than decorative competence. Stratton’s own ambition went further: she hoped one day to become a lawyer herself. Her employers knew about the Playboy appearance and, according to the magazine, were entirely supportive.
William Graham photographed her centerfold, but Stratton’s place in Playboy history expanded almost immediately. In 1960 she became the magazine’s first official Playmate of the Year, establishing a title that would become one of Playboy’s most recognizable annual traditions. That distinction gives her a particular place in the archive: she was not simply part of the late-1950s transition into a new decade, but the woman attached to a format Playboy would repeat for generations.
Her later working life remained notably practical. Stratton moved into real-estate management, another profession requiring the administrative instincts already evident in her legal work. Decades after the centerfold, she also received an assistant-director credit on the 1999 production Miss Supreme Queen, a small but unexpected return to production work in entertainment.
Stratton died in California in 2016 at the age of 76. Her Playboy history is often reduced to one important first, but the fuller picture is more grounded: legal secretary, aspiring attorney, real-estate manager and occasional production worker as well as model. The distinction that made her part of Playboy history came early; much of the life that followed was spent quietly building careers away from the centerfold.
