Dorothy Stratten

Model / Actor

Name at birth: Dorothy Ruth Hoogstraten

Dorothy Stratten was murdered by her husband, Paul Snider, just months after she was named the 1980 Playboy Playmate of the Year. Stratten was 20 years old. She had moved to Los Angeles with Snider, after his aggressive promotion helped land her in Playboy's August 1979 issue. The two married and Stratten used her break as a model to start a career as an actress. She landed a co-starring role in the Peter Bogdanovich film They All Laughed (released in 1981, after her death), and she and Bogdanovich began a love affair. Having asked Snider for a divorce, Stratten visited him at his home on 14 August 1980, where Snider shot her dead and then killed himself. Stratten's story was told in the TV movie Death of a Centerfold (1981) and in Star 80 (1983), director Bob Fosse's last film. She was the source of a long-standing feud between Bogdanovich and Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, and the subject of Bogdanovich's 1984 book The Killing of the Unicorn.

Extra credit: Stratten and Snider were played by Mariel Hemingway and Eric Roberts in Star 80 and by Jamie Lee Curtis and Bruce Weitz in Death of a Centerfold... Bogdanovich married Stratten's half-sister Louise in 1988; they divorced in 2001.

Other actresses who came to tragic ends include Sharon Tate, Jayne Mansfield and the so-called Black Dahlia.