Dorothy Stratten Bio 
Dorothy Stratten was a Canadian actress, glamour and nude model. Born Dorothy Ruth Hoogstraten on February 28, 1960, in Vancouver, Canada, she has also been credited as Miss Cosmos and Galaxina. Playboy named her its August 1979 Playmate at 19. She was later named Playmate of the Year 1980. Her appearance came during Playboy's 1970s print era, when the magazine reached the height of its mass-market influence.
Stratten had natural breasts, blue eyes and blond hair. Her measurements are 36-24-36.
Dorothy Stratten’s route to Playboy began with the magazine’s 25th Anniversary Playmate search in 1978. Paul Snider, whom she was dating in Vancouver, encouraged her to enter and arranged photographs for the submission. Playboy brought her to Los Angeles as a candidate; although the anniversary title ultimately went to Candy Loving, Stratten remained firmly on the magazine’s radar. What followed was not simply a modeling assignment but the beginning of an unusually rapid transition from Vancouver teenager to a young woman working inside Hollywood.
In 1980, Playboy named Stratten Playmate of the Year, just as her screen career was gathering momentum. Television appearances included Fantasy Island and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, and she was invited onto The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson. Film roles arrived quickly as well, including Skatetown U.S.A., Galaxina and Autumn Born. The pace of that progression is part of what makes her story so striking: within a remarkably short span, she moved from Playboy’s pages into television studios and theatrical films.
Her most important film collaboration came with director Peter Bogdanovich, who cast her in They All Laughed. Their relationship became personal as well as professional while Stratten’s marriage to Snider was deteriorating. The film would ultimately become her final screen appearance and was released in 1981, after her death. Bogdanovich later wrote The Killing of the Unicorn about Stratten and the circumstances surrounding her life and murder.
On August 14, 1980, at the age of 20, Stratten was killed by Snider in the Los Angeles apartment they had previously shared; he then killed himself. The brutality of her death inevitably became inseparable from the way her life was remembered, but it also threatened to reduce a fast-developing career to its ending. In the months before her death, Stratten had already accumulated Playboy recognition, film work, network television appearances and a major role for an established Hollywood director—an unusually compressed body of work for someone barely out of her teens.
Hollywood continued returning to her story. Jamie Lee Curtis portrayed her in the 1981 television film Death of a Centerfold: The Dorothy Stratten Story, while Bob Fosse directed Star 80 in 1983, with Mariel Hemingway as Stratten and Eric Roberts as Snider. She also inspired Bryan Adams’ “The Best Was Yet to Come” and was later referenced in Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Californication.” Those retellings have kept the tragedy prominent, but Stratten’s own work remains the more revealing record: photographs, television appearances and films documenting a career that was moving forward with extraordinary speed when it was cut short.
