When June Wilkinson was a child in Eastbourne, a seaside resort town on the south coast of England, she considered herself an ugly duckling, especially compared with her cute older brother, Robin, who “would remain picture-perfect once Mum got him dressed,” she once recalled. “I, on the other hand, Little Miss Tomboy, was a complete mess within minutes.”
She once dared to tell her father that she dreamed of becoming a Hollywood glamour queen: “He picked me up, took me to a wall mirror, and said, ‘Now, does that look like the face of a movie star?’”
That was perhaps the last time anyone considered her looks a career impediment.
She ultimately proved her father wrong, and in dramatic fashion. Ms. Wilkinson — who died on July 21 at her home in Long Beach, Calif., at 85 — went on to appear in more than two dozen films and television shows starting in the early 1960s. And she was well aware that the cornerstone of her legacy lay between her shoulders and her navel.
Her daughter, Brahna Pastorini, confirmed the death,
As her biographical blurb on the Internet Movie Database reads: “Voluptuous would be an understatement when describing the incredibly-endowed June Wilkinson, whose va-va-voom 43-22-37 contours filled out a 5’ 6” frame that rivaled Jayne Mansfield and Mamie Van Doren during the heyday of the pneumatic blonde bombshell.”
A pinup queen as well as a screen temptress, Ms. Wilkinson carved out a thriving side career posing topless in men’s magazines with titles like Girl Watcher and Fling Festival. She also became something of a mascot for Playboy, appearing in the magazine seven times (although never as a Playmate of the Month centerfold).
A write-up accompanying her first Playboy pictorial, in 1958, compared Ms. Wilkinson favorably to Ms. Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe: “All of these were lowercase bosoms. The first Bosom worthy of a capital B has only recently reached Tinseltown.”
Little wonder that she was known as “the most photographed nude in America.”
Inevitably, she was a magnet for the breast-obsessed director Russ Meyer, who photographed her for the magazine and was intent on casting her in his 1959 sexploitation comedy, “The Immoral Mr. Teas.”
Because she was signed to a different production company, Ms. Wilkinson was not contractually allowed to appear in the film. Even so, her bare breasts did, visible in a torso-only window shot in an uncredited appearance she made as a favor to the director. Keen-eyed aficionados of her form were not fooled, she later observed: “I guess breasts are like fingerprints; there are no two alike.”
If she felt overly objectified by what came to be known as the male gaze, she never let on. Her 2023 autobiography had the frothy title “Hollywood or Bust!” and featured a shot on the cover of her balancing two full martini glasses on her chest.
It was an era when actresses’ careers could be made or broken according to entrenched beauty archetypes reinforced by male producers, directors and even critics, who freely referred to her “big bazooms” or used labels like “orb-popper.”
But her daughter said that she largely enjoyed her role as sex symbol, and Ms. Wilkinson made that point herself in interviews from the beginning. As she told Playboy in 1958, “I realized some time ago that as long as there were men in this world, I’d make good.”
June Rose Wilkinson was born on March 27, 1940, in Essex, England, to Robert Wilkinson, a window cleaner, and Lillian (Curryer) Wilkinson, who worked in a tailor shop.
As she entered her teens, she began training at a local dance school, with hopes of becoming a ballerina. It was not to be.
“When I woke up on my 14th birthday, there they were — large breasts,” she wrote in her autobiography. “Unlike other teenage girls who were embarrassed by them, I loved them. I was the only girl in my class that had not been asked out on a date.”
Too top-heavy to be a prima ballerina, she changed her focus to tap and modern dance. While she was a student at the Carlyle School for Young Ladies, one of her dance teachers suggested she audition for the Windmill Theater, a renowned venue in London modeled on the Moulin Rouge in Paris.
Although she was only 15, she got the job. Under the name Baby June, she performed a tastefully erotic fan dance nude, albeit largely covered up by the billowy fans. Her parents approved enough to attend one of her performances.
By 17, she had become a known quantity around London and was ready to take a stab at stardom in the United States. So she moved to New York, where she took acting lessons and eventually signed with Seven Arts Productions.
In 1960, after taking a page from the Monroe playbook and dying her brunette hair blond, she earned her first credited big-screen role in “The Private Lives of Adam and Eve,” directed by and starring Mickey Rooney.
Ms. Wilkinson secured a featured role the next year in “The Continental Twist” (also known as “Twist All Night”), a comedy starring the entertainer Louis Prima, and a year after that she appeared in “The Bellboy and the Playgirls,” a 3-D comedy co-directed by a young Francis Ford Coppola. She went on to appear on television shows including “Batman” and “The Doris Day Show.”
She also made her presence known onstage: She appeared on Broadway in “Pajama Tops,” a farce about a philandering husband, in 1963, and appeared in West Coast productions of “The Marriage-Go-Round,” starring Louis Jourdan, and “Norman, Is That You?,” with Milton Berle.
As the women’s movement swept the nation in the late 1960s, newspapers began shying away from printing her measurements. But, as she wrote in her autobiography, she had never taken offense to the “silliness” of the practice — although, she added, “I wonder how men would have reacted if their penis size had been posted along with their pictures. Now that I am thinking about it, what a great idea.”
In 1973, she married Dan Pastorini, the Houston Oilers’ sculpted quarterback, who was nine years younger and considered a rival to Joe Namath as a No. 1 draft pick for eligible bachelorettes. (In 1975, the couple starred together in “The Florida Connection,” a tale of marijuana smuggling. They divorced in 1982).
Ms. Wilkinson continued to earn film roles through the 1970s and ’80s, and remained active onstage through the late ’90s.
In addition to her daughter, she is survived by two brothers, Robin and John.
In a 1998 survey of the 100 sexiest women of the 20th century, Playboy listed Ms. Wilkinson at No. 30, ahead of the likes of Madonna, Catherine Deneuve and Claudia Schiffer.
This would have come as a surprise to her father. In her book, Ms. Wilkinson recounted a party that he attended after the premiere of her movie “The Rage” (1962). When a journalist asked Mr. Wilkinson what he thought of his daughter’s image as a sex symbol, he remained steadfast: “I think she’s doing a con job on the American public.”
Alex Williams is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
The post June Wilkinson, Pinup Star and Screen Siren, Is Dead at 85 appeared first on New York Times.
