Virginia Gordon

About Virginia Gordon

Virginia Gordon (born October 28, 1936, in Chaplin, West Virginia) is an American model and actress. She was Playboy magazine's Playmate of the Month for the January 1959 issue. Her centerfold was photographed by Ron Vogel.

Virginia enjoyed a prolific career as a pin-up and nude model before and after her Playboy appearance. She was so prolific, in fact, that Playboy editor Hugh Hefner was compelled to establish exclusivity contracts with future Playmates that kept them from appearing nude in any non-Playboy project for two years following their Playmate pictorials.

Gordon's acting roles were confined to appearing, mostly sans wardrobe, in a string of obscure sexploitation films produced for the adults-only grindhouse circuit. Her first three films were Once Upon a Knight (1961), written by Bob Cresse, Surftide 77 (1962), directed by Lee Frost, and Tonight for Sure (1962), the film that marked the directorial debut of Francis Ford Coppola, were standard "nudie cutie" comedies typical of the early sixties.

In 1968, Olympic International (created by the writer-director team of Frost and Cresse) produced the "roughie" thriller The Animal. Gordon has her most substantial and realistic role as a single mother terrorized and turned into an abused sex slave by a psychopath. That same year she starred in another Frost/Cresse film, Hot Spur, a violent roughie western in which her character suffers similar abuse. Her final two films, Acapulco Uncensored and The Muthers (both from 1968) were softcore "nudies" from prolific skinflick director Donald A. Davis.