Karen Thompson Bio
Karen Thompson is an American actress, glamour and nude model. She was born on September 4, 1939, in New York City, New York. Playboy named her its August 1961 Playmate at 21. Her appearance came during the 1960s, as Playboy grew into a major force in American magazine publishing.
Thompson has natural breasts, green eyes and red hair. Her measurements are 32-26-34.
Karen Thompson had already been appearing in Playboy before readers knew her name. For months she modeled clothing for advertiser Margie Douglas, turning up repeatedly in the magazine’s advertising pages without identification. The mystery apparently generated enough reader interest—and enough curiosity inside Playboy itself—that the editors tracked down the woman behind the ads and invited her to move from the commercial pages into an editorial pictorial of her own.
Modeling was only one part of Thompson’s work. She was also building television experience, appearing on series including The Aquanauts and Hawaiian Eye. That combination of advertising and screen work made her a particularly natural fit for Playboy at the beginning of the 1960s: she was already accustomed to selling a look in still photographs and carrying herself in front of a television camera.
Mario Casilli photographed her centerfold, bringing the controlled lighting and composed studio style that would become closely associated with his work for the magazine. The session avoided elaborate staging, relying instead on clean framing and Thompson’s ease before the camera—a logical progression for someone readers had first noticed while she was modeling clothes in Playboy’s own advertising section.
That origin gives Thompson one of the more self-contained discovery stories in the early Playboy archive. She was not spotted at a club or sent in by an agent; the magazine effectively discovered her inside its own pages. Anonymous advertising model became identified television actress, then editorial subject—a neat example of Playboy turning reader curiosity into a centerfold.
