Willy Rey Bio
Willy Rey was a Dutch actress, glamour and nude model. She was born Wilhelmina Rietveld on August 25, 1949, in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Playboy named her its February 1971 Playmate at 21. Her appearance came during Playboy's 1970s print era, when the magazine reached the height of its mass-market influence.
Rey had natural breasts, green eyes and red hair. Her measurements are 34-23-34.
Mario Casilli — the photographer whose work helped define Playboy’s glossy visual language — photographed Rey’s centerfold, a layout that carried the magazine’s polished commercial look into newsstands and collectors’ hands. She moved with her family to Canada when she was six, a childhood transposition that left her working life conducted outside the country of her birth and added a quietly transatlantic dimension to the face readers came to know.
That face did something few centerfolds ever did: it migrated off the page and into corporate paperwork. A reproduction of her nude likeness was used on the stock certificate for Playboy Enterprises during the company’s initial public offering on November 3, 1971 — a striking example of how magazine imagery and corporate identity intersected in the brand’s early years.
Rey’s life ended abruptly in Vancouver on August 19, 1973, when she died of a barbiturate overdose. The circumstances around her death were reported at the time and remain part of the record; they truncated a brief, high-visibility chapter in the visual history of the era.
Whatever biographies and collector’s albums say about the photographs themselves, the unusual afterlife of that particular image — from glossy centerfold to printed stock certificate — ensures that Rey’s likeness occupies an odd corner of magazine and corporate history, a reminder that the era’s pictures traveled in more directions than the magazine ever advertised.
