June Wilkinson, who has died aged 85, was a British-born showgirl who became a popular Playboy model and B-movie starlet after crossing the Atlantic in 1958. One of the most curvaceous blonde bombshells, June fought to prove herself as more than just another pin-up – and in an echo of Marilyn Monroe’s romance with Joe DiMaggio, she also married (and divorced) a famous athlete. During a lengthy, unconventional career, she reinvented herself as a stage diva, cable TV broadcaster, and fitness guru.

She was born in 1940, and grew up in the seaside resort town of Eastbourne on England’s south coast. Her father was a window cleaner, and her mother took in sewing to pay for June’s lessons at the Sussex School of Dancing. At twelve, she played the fairy godmother onstage in Cinderella, but by the age of fourteen her focus had changed from ballet to modern dance and tap. “Big bosoms and Swan Lake don’t go together,” she quipped in a 1995 interview for Psychotronic Video magazine.

June’s father scoffed at her dream of being a film star, but her dance teacher suggested she audition for the Windmill Theatre in London’s West End. Aged fifteen, ‘Baby June’ enacted an artfully nude fan dance and went on to perform in other nightclubs until 1958, when a businessman flew her to New York to represent his company in a Miss Plastic Houseware contest.

As part of the promotional campaign, she performed a comedy skit on NBC’s The Today Show, hosted by Dave Garroway. Producer Ray Stark offered her a contract with Seven Arts, a newly formed independent company which later produced The Misfits, West Side Story, and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

June met Hugh Hefner in Chicago, and went on to pose for several Playboy layouts (though never as the centrefold.) While June’s studio bosses were initially nervous, it led to more photo shoots for girlie magazines, and she was hailed as ‘the most photographed nude in America.’ “I don’t know if it hurt my career,” she admitted. “If I had to do it again, I would have waited. But what it did was give me an audience.”

Hollywood, which has given us The Body and The Back, has also given us plenty of bosoms, starting with Lana Turner’s besweatered charms, continuing through the delightful double features of Marilyn Monroe, and reaching an appetising apogee in the mighty measurements of Mansfield. But all of these were lower case bosoms. The first Bosom worthy of a capital B has only recently reached Tinseltown. She’s an import, but not from Sweden or Italy – climes seemingly most conducive to such classic cultivations. It – or they – are from staid old England and are the perky properties of a pretty young Londoner named June (45-22-36) Wilkinson … With disarming candour, she said of her success, ‘I know being a girl with a big bust has done all this for me. I realised some time ago that as long as there were men in this world, I’d make good.’ One man interested in helping her make good is Howard Hughes, who discovered Jane Russell, Janet Leigh and several other ladies who are not exactly busts in the bust department.

For the next year she took acting and voice lessons, but although in demand as a model, suitable film work was hard to find. A regular paycheque from Seven Arts didn’t ease her frustration, and she took another job with comedy bandleader Spike Jones. A natural brunette, she bleached her hair and was given a walk-on role as a ‘buxom blonde’ in a Western, Thunder in the Sun (1959.) “I had one brief scene and a line,” she said. “That was the most expensive line Seven Arts ever paid for.”

She caught the eye of Elvis Presley, then filming King Creole at Paramount, and he took her to his suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. At twenty-three, Presley was five years her senior. “He starts to try to make love to me and I said, ‘Oh I’m really sorry, I’m a virgin’,” she recalled. “So when he found out I was a virgin he picked up his guitar and sat on his bed and sang to me for about two hours. That was it. He was very sweet.”

Photographer Russ Meyer wanted her to appear in his low-budget movie, The Immoral Mr. Teas, which launched his outlandish career in sexploitation. “Obviously I couldn’t do that because I was under contract to Seven Arts,” she explained. “And this was not the kind of movie they’d want me to be in. So just as a gag, and a favour to Russ, there’s a moment when there’s this small window, and this woman goes to the window and pulls the blind. You can’t see my head, but those breasts are mine. I got no credit, and I didn’t charge. That was me saying, ‘Good luck on your first movie, Russ.’ But it’s funny, people know today it was me. I guess it’s like fingerprints. No two bosoms are alike.”

Her first major role was in Albert Zugsmith’s The Private Lives of Adam and Eve (1960), a comic fantasy following eight unhappy couples on a bus ride to Reno, Nevada’s divorce capital. When a flood leaves the passengers stranded, a collective dream returns them to the Garden of Eden. June played ‘Saturday’, mistress to Nick, aka the Devil (Mickey Rooney.) Another blonde bombshell, Mamie Van Doren, singer Mel Tormé, and a young Tuesday Weld also appeared in this star-studded folly, which June said was “overloaded.”

After a supporting role in a cult voodoo flick, Macumba Love, she starred in Career Girl, which promised to expose ‘The Adventures of June Wilkinson – that Play-Girl – in the Exclusive Behind-the-Scenes Story of the fetching figure. She reached stardom by using all her nature-given charms!”

In 1961, she appeared uncredited in Too Late Blues, a moody jazz saga with Bobby Darin and Stella Stevens. “You’ve got so much talent,” co-star John Cassavetes told her. “Don’t you dare coast on your body alone.” A bit part in Lover Come Back, a rom-com vehicle for Rock Hudson and Doris Day, and an episode of TV’s 77 Sunset Strip followed. She then starred in a musical, Twist All Night. Her leading man, singer Louis Prima, ordered his bandmates not to make dirty jokes around her. When filming wrapped, he gave her a diamond and gold bracelet with the inscription, ‘A Fine Lady.’

The Bellboy and the Playgirls (1962) was directed by Francis Ford Coppola, and released with the tagline, ‘June is busting out all over!’ (Ten years later, when The Godfather made Coppola Hollywood’s hottest director, she was utterly bemused.) Her next film, La Rabio (Rage), was a Mexican crime drama, followed by a bit part in Daniel Mann’s Who’s Got the Action?, starring Dean Martin and Lana Turner. In the same year, June Wilkinson and Her Physical Fitness Formula was released on Calendar Records.

In 1963 she starred in a touring production of the French farce, Pajama Tops, and her popularity led to a stint on Broadway. Back in California she performed in a number of summer stock plays, including Tennessee Williams’ Baby Doll; The Marriage-Go-Round, with Louis Jourdan; and a short tour of US Army bases in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? 

Once again, she was teamed with Mamie Van Doren for The Candidate (1964), her last film role for several years. “The studio kept trying to make me act, sound and look like Marilyn Monroe, or whatever they thought Monroe was,“ she recalled. When filming a bedroom scene, co-star Ted Knight worried that he might become aroused. She reassured him that in front of a camera crew, sex would be the last thing on his mind – and he later described it as the most ‘unsensual’ experience imaginable.

After a cover story for Top Secret magazine – headlined ‘Bustiest Nude Calls it Quits’ – hit newsstands in the US, June said that modelling had “turned me into a sex symbol … a freak. Now I’ve got to prove I’m something more than a body.”

In 1966 she starred in another play, Any Wednesday; and in 1968, she appeared in TV’s Batman as ‘Evelina’, hench-woman to Nora Clavicle (Barbara Rush.) She dated Canadian singer Paul Anka for two years, and more briefly, fellow Brit George Harrison. She toured with Sylvia Sidney in a 1969 production of Neil Simon’s Come Blow Your Horn; and had a guest spot on The Doris Day Show in 1970.

She married NFL quarterback Dan Pastorini in 1973, and they had a daughter, Brahna Marie. Following an uncredited role in a blaxploitation classic, The Mack, June co-starred with her husband in 1974’s The Florida Connection (aka Weed.) She also reprised Pajama Tops for the dinner theatre circuit, and toured with Milton Berle in Norman, Where Are You?  

The Pastorinis divorced in 1982. Among June’s later film credits, she was billed third as a glamorous casino boss in Sno-Line (1985), and appeared as herself in an unfinished Hollywood exposé, Medium Rare (1987), joining an oddball cast including LSD guru Dr. Timothy Leary.

In 1997, she graced the cover of Glamour Girls: Then & Now; and in 1999, she was ranked 30th among Playboy‘s 100 Sexiest Women of All Time. She later managed a chain of fitness centres in Canada, and worked on cable TV shows such as The Directors and 5,000 Years of Glamour. Her autobiography, Hollywood or Bust!, was published independently in 2023.

June Wilkinson died at home in Long Beach on July 21, 2025, and is survived by her brothers, Robin and John; and her daughter, tennis champion Brahna Pastorini.