Martha Smith Bio
Martha Smith is an American glamour model, television personality, and actress. Born Martha Anne Smith on October 16, 1952, in Cleveland, Ohio, she has also been credited as Martha L. Smith. Playboy named her its July 1973 Playmate at 20. Her appearance came during Playboy's 1970s print era, when the magazine reached the height of its mass-market influence.
Smith has natural breasts, blue eyes and blond hair. Her measurements are 36-23-35.
A Michigan State University student fluent in French and Italian, Smith translated classroom study into a practical early career: television commercials that put her in front of cameras and casting directors rather than college lecture halls. Those spots yielded steady guest work on network series in the mid‑1970s—small parts on Quincy, M.E., Charlie’s Angels, Happy Days and Taxi—that turned a familiar face into a reliable booking for television producers.
Her leap to features arrived in 1978 with National Lampoon’s Animal House, where she played Barbara “Babs” Jansen in John Landis’s anarchic college comedy. The film’s long afterlife in popular culture only widened the opportunities that followed, making the brief but memorable turn a defining screen credit on a résumé otherwise built from short, workmanlike television appearances.
Television would remain Smith’s steadier medium. She spent several seasons as Agent Francine Desmond on Scarecrow and Mrs. King, sharing the screen with Kate Jackson and Bruce Boxleitner, and she turned up in daytime and genre work alike—portraying Sandy Horton on Days of Our Lives and appearing in series ranging from Dallas to Swamp Thing (as Linda Holland). Along the way she was a familiar face on game shows and in the casting mix for both guest and recurring parts, a working presence more than a headline star.
Off camera, Smith’s life kept a deliberate professional rhythm: marriages to Noel Blanc (1977–1986) and later to jazz musician Keith England in 2000, and occasional film work in the 2000s such as Loveless in Los Angeles and The Seduction of Dr. Fugazzi. Her centerfold—shot by Pompeo Posar—proved to be only one moment in a career that threaded magazine glamour into a long run of steady screen work.
