Dolores Donlon

About Dolores Donlon

Donlon was the oldest Playmate of all time, until 2025, having been 36 when the issue came out.

Donlon had a busy life before becoming a Playmate - she attended a French convent school in New York State, became a successful model in New York City in the 1940s, was a contract player at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and had married twice before she appeared in Playboy during her second marriage, which lasted from 1949 to 1960. She married a third time in 1962 (with whom had a child in 1963) and a fourth time in 1974, all ending in divorce. Donlon also posed for several other men's magazines, as well as the cover of Life magazine.

After marrying New York Philharmonic violinist Robert de Pasquale, with whom she was expecting a baby in May of 1963, she moved to New York City and apparently retired from the big and small screens.

After being elected "Queen of the New York Press Photographer's Ball" in 1945, soon after her arrival in New York City, she worked as a model for $500 a week, under the name of Pat Van Iver. By the end of the year, her pin-up photograph was voted by more than 300,000 GI's as the "picture of the year." Eight years later, her pin-up (by Stew Sawyer) is named as the best cheesecake shot of 1953, by United Press.

In October 1954, Donlon was sued by agent Walter Thornton for $120,000 in damages in Los Angeles, under the charge of not satisfying the terms of a contract he claimed was signed in 1945.

In June of 1960, while on location in Papeete, Tahiti, she suffered from minor heat stroke as she worked in 120-degree temperatures for the Italian-French co-produced film Nude Odyssey (1961) (aka "Naked Odyssey").

Dolores and Ruta Lee once promoted the world's largest and most expensive martini for the manufacture of Vermouth. The martini was made with 120 quarts of gin and 60 quarts of dry vermouth.

Lived for two years in the 1970s in Colombia.