Missy Cleveland Bio
Missy Cleveland was an American actress, glamour and nude model. She was born on December 25, 1959, in Jackson, Mississippi, and has also been credited as Amanda Hodges Cleveland. Playboy named her its April 1979 Playmate at 19. Her appearance came during Playboy's 1970s print era, when the magazine reached the height of its mass-market influence.
Cleveland had natural breasts, brown eyes and blond hair. Her measurements are 34-22-32.
Long before the magazine spotlight, she was already a competitor: at ten she entered the Little Miss Mississippi pageant, a childhood taste of staged glamour that her mother would later nudge toward a national contest. It was that encouragement that sent her into Playboy’s "25th Anniversary Great Playmate Hunt," the nationwide search that produced the centerfold photographed by Mario Casilli — a composed, studio-shot portrait that played the era’s tidy duality of wholesome and suggestive.
The centerfold opened a few doors in Los Angeles. She spent time with Playboy’s modeling agency in the city, moving in the same circles as the decade’s commercial beauties, and picked up a handful of small screen-and-screening-room credits. Among them was a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment in Brian De Palma’s Blow Out, a brief turn as a college coed tucked into the edges of a sleeker, grimmer thriller — the sort of tiny, telling work that kept her visible without ever turning her into a full-time Hollywood fixture.
After the quick swirl of coast-to-coast opportunity she stepped away from the pace. She lived for periods in Florida and Canada before returning home; in later years her professional life shifted into property management, and she became a visible presence in her local Baptist church. Those choices reframed a career that had once been measured in pages and photocalls into something steadier and more rooted.
Seen together, the chapters make a tidy, human arc: a child in pageants, a centerfold by a noted photographer, a brief flirtation with film and agency life, and a conscious withdrawal into private work and community ties. It’s a sequence that keeps the glamour where it belongs — as part of a life rather than the whole of it.
