Ashlyn Martin Bio
Ashlyn Martin was a British Playboy Bunny, actress, glamour and nude model. She was born Laura Lynn Hale on March 20, 1946, in London, United Kingdom. Playboy named her its April 1964 Playmate at 18. Her appearance came during the 1960s, as Playboy grew into a major force in American magazine publishing.
Martin had natural breasts, brown eyes and brown hair. Her measurements are 37-24-36.
Ashlyn Martin was already part of the Playboy world before her centerfold appeared. She worked as a Bunny at the Chicago Playboy Club and had been featured in the July 1963 pictorial “The Bunnies,” giving readers an earlier glimpse of her in the Club’s signature costume. Playboy later brought her back for additional Mansion photography, including a January 1966 pictorial alongside Allison Parks.
Her centerfold was photographed by Pompeo Posar and Mario Casilli, two of the magazine’s most experienced photographers of the period. The session gave Martin a polished mid-1960s Playboy presentation, but her connection with the magazine extended beyond a single shoot through her Club work, earlier Bunny appearance and later Mansion feature. Hugh Hefner also reportedly linked her professional name to Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, giving the pseudonym an unusually literary origin.
Martin’s brief acting career took her into a very different kind of popular culture. Her best-known role was Marcy in Herschell Gordon Lewis’ Blood Feast, the notorious 1963 horror film that later developed a substantial cult following. She also appeared in the lighter Beach Party and Muscle Beach Party, placing her within two sharply contrasting strains of early-1960s exploitation cinema: gruesome drive-in horror on one side and sunny youth comedy on the other.
That small collection of screen credits gives Martin a more distinctive place in the Playboy archive than glamour photography alone would suggest. She moved between the Chicago Club, Playboy pictorials and low-budget genre films at a moment when all three were becoming recognizable pieces of American pop culture. Her public career was not especially long, but its surviving landmarks are unusually characteristic of the era.
Martin died by suicide in 1991 at the age of 45. Her Playboy work, Bunny years and cult-film appearances nevertheless preserve several different versions of the same performer: Club hostess, centerfold model and actress, moving with surprising ease from Playboy polish to the far stranger world of Blood Feast.
