Janis Schmitt Bio
Janis Schmitt is an American Playboy Bunny, glamour model, and actress. She was born on March 14, 1947, in St. Louis, Missouri. Playboy named her its February 1978 Playmate at 30. Her appearance came during Playboy's 1970s print era, when the magazine reached the height of its mass-market influence.
Schmitt has natural breasts, blue eyes and blond hair. Her measurements are 34-24-35.
Before she posed, Schmitt was part of the scene that supplied Playboy its cast: she worked the floor at the St. Louis Playboy Club and then stepped in front of the camera for a centerfold photographed by Ken Marcus. The shoot favored a straightforward, unadorned glamour—images that played up a Midwestern ease and an unaffected photogenic quality rather than stylized artifice.
Marcus’s centerfold framed that look with quiet attention to line and light, the kind of pictorial that read as much like a portrait as it did a pinup. It’s a reminder that not every memorable magazine image relied on spectacle; some endured because the photographer and subject let a simple mood hold the frame.
Schmitt’s pages were followed by a few brief turns on screen. Her résumé includes a bit part in Mel Brooks’s History of the World: Part I and an appearance as herself on the short-lived variety program Pink Lady, small credits that place her among the many models who tried a hand at show business for a moment or two.
She eventually returned to St. Louis, moved into family life, and became a grandmother. That arc—from club work to a magazine centerfold, a handful of on-screen cameos, and back home—reads like a compact chapter in the late-1970s landscape of American glamour: immediate, visible for a time, and then folded into ordinary life.
