Mary and Madeleine Collinson Bio
Mary and Madeleine Collinson was a Maltese nude and glamour model. She was born on July 22, 1952, in Valletta, Malta, and has also been credited as Mary Collinson and Madeleine Collinson. Playboy named her its October 1970 Playmate at 18. Her appearance came during Playboy's 1970s print era, when the magazine reached the height of its mass-market influence.
Collinson had natural breasts, brown eyes and brown hair. Her measurements are 36-25-36.
They were the first identical twin Playmate sisters, a distinction that made their twinship a defining element of a short but busy career. Arriving in Britain in 1969, the sisters found an early patron in glamour photographer and filmmaker Harrison Marks, who both photographed them and gave them a bit-part as maids in his short film Halfway Inn.
On screen the twins moved easily between bit roles and genre work. Credits in contemporary British productions included Come Back, Peter, Permissive and Groupie Girl, while their most memorable film appearances came for Hammer Films: Mary and Madeleine played Maria and Frieda Gellhorn in the 1971 vampire picture Twins of Evil, sharing the bill with veteran horror actor Peter Cushing. They also turned up in lighter, mainstream fare such as She’ll Follow You Anywhere and The Love Machine.
Outside the camera’s glare they spent several years working in continental fashion; a move to Milan extended their modeling beyond the British scene and preceded a quieter turn toward family life. Madeleine married a Royal Air Force officer, raised three children and eventually returned to Malta; she died on 14 August 2014 after several months of illness. Mary lived for many years in Milan and died on 23 November 2021.
Taken together, the Collinsons’ story is compact and unmistakable: twin imagery carried them from Marks’s glamour sets into horror’s candlelit mirrors and the runways of Europe, producing an unmistakable pair of credits that remain the key markers of their public life.
