Maria McBane Bio
Maria McBane is a Spanish actress, glamour and nude model. She was born on February 8, 1946, in Bilbao, Spain, and has also been credited as Maria Paco and Marie McBane. Playboy named her its May 1965 Playmate at 19. Her appearance came during the 1960s, as Playboy grew into a major force in American magazine publishing.
McBane has natural breasts, brown eyes and brown hair. Her measurements are 36-22-36.
Maria McBane’s early Playboy biography gave readers a romantic story of French-Irish roots and a childhood near Avignon, but she later corrected that account herself. McBane said she was actually of Basque ancestry, born in Bilbao, Spain, and had spent part of her youth in Cuba before coming to the United States. She explained that someone outside Playboy had suggested France sounded more elegant, and she had gone along with the embellishment—a revealing little artifact of how glamour biographies were sometimes manufactured in the 1960s.
Ed DeLong and William Figge photographed her centerfold, giving the session the controlled, polished look associated with Playboy’s mid-1960s photography. Modeling was only one part of McBane’s public life, however. Soon afterward she made a brief move into Hollywood, appearing under the name Marie McBane as a Leander fan in the 1966 stock-car picture Fireball 500, alongside Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello and Fabian.
That screen appearance proved to be a short detour rather than the start of an acting career. McBane eventually moved to Hawaii, where her life took on a far more entrepreneurial character. From 1984 until 1994, she and her husband operated the restaurant Huevos, building a business far removed from magazine studios and movie sets. The restaurant closed after a land dispute, forcing another change of direction.
McBane subsequently entered public and professional life in several new ways. She ran for the Hawaii legislature in 1996, later worked in human resources for HMAA medical insurance and developed a career in real estate under her married name, Maria Paco. She also worked in residential property management, continuing a pattern of practical reinvention that stretched across several decades.
Her later life makes the original glamour narrative feel almost like a prologue. McBane moved from modeling and a brief Hollywood credit into restaurant ownership, politics, insurance, real estate and property management in Hawaii. Even the mythology surrounding her origins eventually gave way to her own correction of the record—a fitting final detail for a woman whose life proved considerably more varied than the polished story printed beside her photographs.
