Paige Young Bio
Paige Young was an American artist, Playboy Bunny, glamour and pin-up model. Born Diana Lee Cotterell on March 16, 1944, in Los Angeles, California, she has also been credited as Paige Diane Lee Young. Playboy named her its November 1968 Playmate at 24. Her appearance came during the 1960s, as Playboy grew into a major force in American magazine publishing.
Young had natural breasts, hazel eyes and brown hair. Her measurements are 36-24-36.
Paige Young’s life outside modeling was centered on art. Working from a studio in Malibu, she painted portraits, seascapes, bold abstractions and neo-impressionist pieces while resisting the conventional nine-to-five life she found so constraining. Painting was not an easy way to earn a living, and Young readily admitted that she had to work at it, but independence mattered more to her than security. She believed an artist needed to remain closely attuned to both herself and her surroundings, which helps explain why nature occupied so much of her time away from the canvas.
That attachment to the natural world extended well beyond occasional trips outdoors. Young meditated, read poetry, listened to classical music and practiced skin diving in the waters around Santa Monica. She enjoyed preparing food gathered from the wild and imagined an ideal evening built around music, conversation and a fireside rather than nightlife. Even her approach to relationships emphasized communication: she thought people would be happier if they genuinely talked to one another instead of merely talking at each other.
Photography entered that world through Peter Gowland, who photographed her centerfold. Young treated the experience as another part of a life already divided between artistic work and the outdoors rather than as a wholesale reinvention. She later worked as a Bunny at the Hollywood Playboy Club, placing her closer to the entertainment world even as her own ambitions remained strongly tied to painting. One of the artists she especially admired was Truman Capote; she completed a portrait of him and, despite being offered $500 for it, hoped instead to give it to him personally.
Young spoke candidly about wanting to become a great painter and dreamed of studying in Paris. She had little enthusiasm for pop art, dismissing it as a reflection of contemporary culture that held little interest for her own work. Nature, by contrast, offered the kind of elemental beauty and energy she wanted to translate into paint. Her artistic outlook was therefore less about fashion than about preserving a sense of private space in a culture increasingly dominated by spectacle.
Young died by suicide in 1974 at the age of 30. The circumstances of her death inevitably became part of how her life was remembered, but they should not erase the woman visible in her own words: a painter, reader, diver and lover of solitude who wanted freedom from impersonal routines and enough room to make something of her own. Her Playboy photographs captured only one part of that life; the stronger thread running through it was her insistence on art, nature and independence.
