Marilyn Cole Bio 
Marilyn Cole is a British actress, Playboy Bunny, glamour and nude model. She was born on May 7, 1949, in Portsmouth, United Kingdom. Playboy named her its January 1972 Playmate at 22. She was later named Playmate of the Year 1973. Her appearance came during Playboy's 1970s print era, when the magazine reached the height of its mass-market influence.
Cole has natural breasts, brown eyes and brown hair. Her measurements are 35-24-36.
Marilyn Cole’s route into Playboy began at the London Playboy Club, where she arrived from Portsmouth with only modest modeling experience and doubts about whether she even looked the part. Before that, she had worked ordinary jobs at the Portsmouth telephone exchange, the Co-op Fuel Office and as a barmaid in Southsea. Within days of becoming a Bunny in 1971, however, she had attracted the attention of Playboy executive Victor Lownes and was test-photographed for the magazine. Cole later moved into public-relations work at the Club, giving her an unusually broad view of the Playboy operation from both sides of the velvet rope.
Her centerfold became historically significant for another reason: it was Playboy’s first to show unrestricted full-frontal nudity. The photographs were taken by Alexas Urba, and the pictorial marked a subtle but unmistakable shift in what the magazine was prepared to publish. Cole herself had initially worried that she was the wrong shape for modeling, yet Playboy’s response was emphatic. In 1973 she was named Playmate of the Year, becoming the first—and still the only—British woman to receive the title.
The Playmate of the Year assignment turned into a considerable travel opportunity, with photographs made in several countries and her gatefold shot in Crete. Playboy also presented her with a Volvo sports car, creating the slightly comic problem that Cole, accustomed to life in London without a car, had yet to learn to drive. She later returned to Playboy for follow-up pictorials in 1984 and 1989, extending a relationship with the magazine that had begun with considerable uncertainty.
Outside Playboy, Cole became part of another distinctly 1970s cultural moment. She dated Bryan Ferry and appeared on the cover of Roxy Music’s 1973 album Stranded, after earlier appearances on various Top of the Pops record covers. Playboy had also placed her within the orbit of Hugh Hefner and Victor Lownes; Cole ultimately married Lownes in 1984, and the couple remained together until his death in 2017.
Cole’s post-Playboy career moved into journalism, a direction far removed from the uncertainty she had expressed when first entering the London Club. The Bunny who once worried that her legs were too thin ended up occupying a singular place in Playboy history, crossing from club work to magazine landmark, record-cover iconography and later writing. Few British Playmates were so closely woven into both Playboy’s international expansion and the broader glamour culture of the early 1970s.
