Jo Collins Bio 
Jo Collins is an American actress, glamour and nude model. Born Janet Canoy on August 5, 1945, in Lebanon, Oregon, she has also been credited as G.I. Jo. Playboy named her its December 1964 Playmate at 19. She was later named Playmate of the Year 1965. Her appearance came during the 1960s, as Playboy grew into a major force in American magazine publishing.
Collins has natural breasts, blue eyes and brown hair. Her measurements are 36-24-36.
Jo Collins was already comfortable in front of an audience before Playboy made her a familiar face. She worked as a page on the television game show Queen for a Day, then moved into the Playboy Club world as a Bunny and eventually a Bunny Mother. That combination of live television, Club work and modeling gave her an easy public presence that Playboy could use far beyond a single pictorial.
Her most memorable Playboy assignment came during the Vietnam War. Lieutenant Jack Price of the 173rd Airborne Brigade purchased a lifetime subscription to the magazine and requested that Collins deliver the first issue personally, taking Playboy up on one of its more extravagant promotional promises. Collins travelled to Vietnam on a USO tour and became known among troops as “G.I. Jo.” General Ellis W. Williamson made her an honorary Sky Soldier, while Price’s Company B reportedly adopted the nickname “Playboy Company.” The episode became one of the more unusual intersections between Playboy promotion and wartime popular culture.
Hollywood followed as well. Collins appeared in a run of American International Pictures productions, including Ski Party, How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, Sergeant Dead Head and Fireball 500. They were lightweight films, but they placed her squarely inside the colorful beach-party and youth-movie cycle of the mid-1960s. Her screen career never displaced Playboy, but it broadened the public identity she had first developed on television and at the Clubs.
Her personal life later connected her to professional baseball through her marriage to Bo Belinsky, with whom she had a daughter. Collins returned to Playboy for the 1979 “Playmates Forever!” pictorial, and in 1998 she reunited with Jack Price for an online Playboy interview, bringing the “G.I. Jo” story full circle more than three decades after Vietnam.
Collins died in 2010. Her Playboy history is unusually rich because it extended well beyond photography: Bunny, Club supervisor, actress, USO entertainer and one of the magazine’s most recognizable goodwill ambassadors all belonged to the same career. The nickname “G.I. Jo” may have started as soldiers’ affection, but it ended up defining one of Playboy’s most distinctive stories from the 1960s.
