Rosanne Katon Bio
Rosanne Katon is an American glamour model, actress, comedian, and activist. She was born on February 5, 1954, in New York City, New York, and has also been credited as Rosanne Katon-Walden. Playboy named her its September 1978 Playmate at 24. Her appearance came during Playboy's 1970s print era, when the magazine reached the height of its mass-market influence.
Katon has natural breasts, brown eyes and black hair. Her measurements are 36-23-34.
Her striking centerfold was photographed by Mario Casilli, and that studio polish arrived amid a busy stretch of television work in the mid‑1970s. Guest turns on Good Times, What's Happening!! and That's My Mama kept her on the small screen, and a turn on St. Elsewhere put her opposite a young Denzel Washington. She also carried a lead on the short‑lived Sanford and Son spinoff Grady, a reminder that her career moved easily between sitcom sets and more dramatic fare.
On film she gravitated toward genre pieces that valued presence and momentum: she led two Cirio Santiago action pictures in 1976, Ebony, Ivory & Jade and The Muthers, the latter sharing its frame with Playboy Playmate Jean Bell. The late 1970s and early 1980s found her in bawdy comedies and cult titles alike—The Swinging Cheerleaders, Chesty Anderson, U.S. Navy, Lunch Wagon, Zapped!, Bachelor Party, Motel Hell and the drama Body and Soul —credits that mapped a steady, working‑actor rhythm rather than a single typecast.
She kept one foot in live performance. Stage work included a Broadway lead in Godspell and a featured turn in the parody Women Behind Bars, and in 1981 she received the Miss Golden Globes honor—an industry spotlight that, as noted at the time, marked the first African‑American woman so chosen since the tradition began in 1962. By the late 1980s she was testing a second act in stand‑up comedy, a shift that led to her inclusion in the June 1991 Playboy pictorial "Funny Girls," a themed feature celebrating women in comedy.
Offstage she has devoted energy to humanitarian work. In 1984 she married Richard Walden, CEO of Operation USA, and has served on the organization's advisory board, participating in relief efforts to regions including Rwanda, Sri Lanka and areas of Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina. The result is a career that threaded genre cinema and theater with comedy and civic engagement—an uncommon mix of screens, stages and service.
