Tonya Crews Bio
Tonya Crews was an American glamour and nude model. She was born Alice Crews on February 2, 1938, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Playboy named her its March 1961 Playmate at 23. Her appearance came during the 1960s, as Playboy grew into a major force in American magazine publishing.
Crews had natural breasts, brown eyes and brown hair. Her measurements are 38-22-36.
Tonya Crews brought an unusually varied set of interests to Playboy. Part Choctaw, she had spent time living on Navajo and Hopi reservation lands in Arizona before moving into the very different world of Hollywood dance. There she worked as a dance teacher and immersed herself in jazz and modern choreography, treating movement as a profession rather than simply a glamorous sideline.
At the time of her Playboy appearance, Crews was developing a jazz dance concert that she intended not only to perform in but also to produce herself. The project reflected ambitions that extended well beyond posing for photographs. She hoped eventually to open a dance studio of her own, turning years of performance and teaching into something more permanent and independently run.
Her interests were surprisingly eclectic. Crews played bass guitar and harbored a serious fascination with mathematics, an ambition Playboy treated with characteristic early-1960s teasing but one that adds a much more interesting dimension to her profile. Dance, music and numbers hardly belonged to the same conventional glamour biography, yet all three were part of how she imagined her future.
Mario Casilli photographed her centerfold with the polished, restrained studio style that became one of his Playboy signatures. Crews did not have the opportunity to build the long career she was planning: she died in an automobile accident in 1966. That makes the surviving portrait especially poignant—not simply because her life was brief, but because Playboy captured her while she was still actively imagining dance productions, a studio of her own and several very different directions in which her life might go.
