Susan Bernard Bio
Susan Bernard was an American glamour model, actress, and author. Born Susan Lynn Bernard on February 11, 1948, in Los Angeles, California, she has also been credited as Sue Bernard. Playboy named her its December 1966 Playmate at 18. Her appearance came during the 1960s, as Playboy grew into a major force in American magazine publishing.
Bernard had natural breasts, brown eyes and brown hair. Her measurements are 35-22-35.
Susan Bernard grew up where Hollywood glamour was literally a family business: her father, Bruno Bernard, built a studio reputation photographing the era’s icons, among them Marilyn Monroe. That inheritance mattered when she took the magazine’s centerfold in front of Mario Casilli’s camera—Casilli often described as a protégé of her father—and carried the old Hollywood portrait tradition into the magazine’s pages with a practiced, camera-savvy ease.
Film work followed in quick, unlikely turns. Bernard took a memorable part in Russ Meyer’s cult drama Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, playing the wide‑eyed Billie, and she crossed into television as well with an appearance on General Hospital during the late 1960s. Those screen credits sit beside a short but visible run in Hollywood that favored brief, distinctive turns rather than long studio tenures.
Far from leaving the family archive to chance, Bernard turned to preserving the images themselves. She wrote several books about the golden age—titles credited to her include Marilyn: Intimate Exposures and Bernard of Hollywood's Ultimate Pin‑Up Book—and served as president of Bernard of Hollywood/Renaissance Road Incorporated, stewarding both prints and the business of a photographer’s estate.
Her story reads less like a single headline and more like a steady stewardship of a particular image of Hollywood: a model and performer who translated an inherited camera literacy into small-screen roles, editorial pages and a catalog of books and curatorial work that kept a mid‑century portrait tradition available for later readers and collectors.
