Heather Menzies Bio
Heather Menzies was a Canadian Actress, glamour and nude model. She was born Heather Margaret Brotherston Menzies on December 3, 1949, in Ontario, Canada. She appeared as a Playboy Muse in August 1973 at 23. Her appearance came during Playboy's 1970s print era, when the magazine reached the height of its mass-market influence.
Menzies had natural breasts, gray eyes and brown hair. Her measurements are 34-24-35.
Heather Menzies entered popular culture while still a teenager, winning the role of Louisa von Trapp in The Sound of Music. Cast as the third-oldest von Trapp child, she became part of one of the most enduring movie musicals of the 1960s. During the famous rowboat sequence, Menzies even helped rescue young co-star Kym Karath, who played Gretl and could not swim when the boat overturned.
Her early screen image was wholesome, but Menzies was never interested in remaining frozen as a child star. She continued acting in films including Hawaii, How Sweet It Is! and Hail, Hero!, while also building a busy television career. By the early 1970s she was consciously moving toward more adult roles, appearing in the offbeat horror film Sssssss and, in 1973, posing nude for Playboy in a pictorial cheekily titled “Tender Trapp.” The title made the connection to her famous movie past impossible to miss while announcing that the former von Trapp daughter had decisively grown up.
Menzies continued reinventing herself after Playboy. One of her best-known later roles came as Jessica 6 in the television adaptation of Logan’s Run, where she traded Austrian mountains for futuristic science fiction. She also became a familiar television guest on shows including Bonanza, Marcus Welby, M.D., The Love Boat and T.J. Hooker, while her film work included the cult horror favorite Piranha.
Her personal and professional life later became closely intertwined with actor Robert Urich, whom she met while filming a television commercial and married in 1975. They adopted three children, and Menzies occasionally appeared alongside him on screen. After Urich died from cancer in 2002, she established the Robert Urich Foundation and devoted much of her later life to raising money for cancer research and supporting patients and their families.
Menzies died in December 2017, only weeks after being diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. Her career had stretched from one of Hollywood’s most beloved family films to Playboy, science fiction, horror and decades of television work. The “Tender Trapp” pictorial sits squarely in the middle of that evolution—a playful but unmistakable declaration that the girl audiences remembered from The Sound of Music had grown into an actress determined to define her image for herself.
