Mary Millington

Mary Ruth Maxted (née Quilter; 30 November 1945 – 19 August 1979), known professionally as Mary Millington from 1974 onwards, was an English model, call girl and pornographic actress. Her appearance in the short softcore film Sex is My Business led to her meeting magazine publisher David Sullivan, who promoted her widely as a model and featured her in the 1977 softcore comedy Come Play with Me, which ran for a record-breaking four years at the same cinema.

In her later years, she faced depression and pressure from frequent police raids on her sex shop. After a downward spiral of drug addiction, shoplifting and debt, she died at home of an overdose of medicine and vodka, aged 33.

Millington has been described as one of the "two hottest British sex film stars of the seventies", the other being Fiona Richmond.

Early life

Mary Ruth Quilter was born on 30 November 1945, and was raised by her single mother, Joan Quilter (1914–1976), initially in the London suburb of Willesden. In 1959, when Mary was 13, Joan and Mary moved to Mid Holmwood near Dorking, Surrey.

Largely growing up without her father, John William G. Klein (1899–1973), Mary was bullied at school because her parents were unmarried, and suffered from low self-esteem throughout her childhood and teenage years. She left school at the age of 15 in 1961, and in 1964, aged 18, married Robert Maxted and settled in Dorking. She spent more than a decade caring for her terminally ill mother, and later entered the pornography industry to help pay for her mother's care.

Millington had originally hoped to become a fashion model, but at 4 feet 11 inches she did not meet the industry's height requirements. Instead, she became a glamour model in the late 1960s.

Career

Soon after starting work as a glamour model, she met the glamour photographer and pornographer John Jesnor Lindsay, who offered to photograph her for softcore magazines. She became one of his most popular models and began appearing in 8mm hardcore pornographic film loops which sold well in Europe. One of her first films was Miss Bohrloch (1970) which won the Golden Phallus Award at the Wet Dream Festival held in November 1970 in Amsterdam. She starred in around twenty short hardcore films for Lindsay, although only five (Miss Bohrloch, Oral Connection, Betrayed, Oh Nurse and Special Assignment) have so far resurfaced. She then returned to modelling for British pornographic magazines such as Knave and Men Only. She also appeared in softcore short films by Russell Gay (Response, 1974), Mountain Films (Love Games, Wild Lovers) and Harrison Marks (Sex is My Business, ).

Sex is My Business was shot late on a Saturday night at a sex shop on London's Coventry Street. The storyline concerned a powerful aphrodisiac being dropped by a customer, the potency of which renders the shop's staff and customers sex crazy. Mary, dressed in a short see-through dress, is the film's main focus of attention, playing a member of staff who drags a customer into the back room for some multi-position sex, thoughtfully turning on the shop's CCTV camera so others can watch. Sex is My Business was considered something of a lost film until a Super 8 print was located and privately transferred to DVD in 2008. The film subsequently made its internet debut on 26 July 2008 at the (now defunct) site ZDD Visual Explosion. In 2010, Sex is My Business was included as a special feature on the DVD re-release of Come Play with Me.

In February 1974, Maureen O’Malley, her co-star in Sex is My Business, introduced her to adult magazine publisher David Sullivan. Although she was still married, the pair became lovers. Mary had used various stage names and aliases during her pornography career until 1974, when Sullivan rebranded her as Mary Millington. In May 1978, Millington was photographed topless outside 10 Downing Street. While she was posing for an innocuous picture with a policeman, she decided to unzip her top and expose her breasts for the photograph. This surprised the people present, including Suzy Mandel, Whitehouse photographer George Richardson (who took the picture), and the policeman (who tried to confiscate the film). According to Simon Sheridan's biography of Millington, "For this stunt Mary was conditionally discharged and bound over to keep the peace".

The filming of Millington's last film appearance took place in early to mid-1978. She played Mary in the Sex Pistols film The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, directed by Julien Temple, which was released theatrically in March 1980. However, neither she nor her punk rock co-star Sid Vicious lived to see the completion of the film. Liz Fraser, one of her co-stars in the film, remembered: "I was next to this girl called Mary Millington, and she and I had a great chat together… and then we went into the pub for a lunch, during the filming of that, and someone said 'she’s a porn star', and I said 'I don’t understand what do you mean' and he said 'porn, p-o-r-n' and he said 'she’s naked and she does everything in all these films', but she was lovely and so I met my first porn star".

Also in 1978, she was approached to appear in a hardcore porn film called Love is Beautiful, to have been directed by Gerard Damiano. However, despite Millington and Damiano being pictured together at that year's Cannes Film Festival, the film (meant to have been produced by David Grant's Oppidan Films) never materialised. Potential co-stars may have included Harry Reems, Gloria Brittain and Lisa Taylor. That same year she turned 33 and found herself being replaced by younger models in Sullivan's magazines.

Advocacy, views and sexuality

Millington was an advocate for the legalisation of pornography, campaigned for the abolition of the Obscene Publications Act and promoted sexual openness and equality.

Millington self-identified as bisexual and said that she preferred lesbian sex.

Millington supported Fulham F.C.

Last years and death

Millington had suffered from neurosis and depression, which were exacerbated by her cocaine habit. Her mother's death at age 62 on 17 May 1976, after over 10 years with cancer, also affected her deeply, and her behaviour became unpredictable, which led to her breaking up with Sullivan. In March 1978, she ceased to work in Sullivan's Whitehouse sex shop in Norbury and opened her own in Tooting, also in South London, called Mary Millington's International Sex Centre. She began to spend more time working in her own shop, selling illegal material. The shop was raided by the police on numerous occasions, and she claimed the police threatened her and forced her to pay protection money.

In the past, she had publicly criticised police raids on sex shops and published the addresses and telephone numbers of Scotland Yard, the Director of Public Prosecutions and Members of Parliament in her magazines. Her life began a downward spiral into drug use and depression following the raids on her shop. A few months prior to her death, she had received a large tax bill which she was unable to pay. Her kleptomania became more pronounced in the last year of her life, with arrests for shoplifting in June 1979 and again for stealing a necklace on 18 August 1979, which was the day before her death.

Millington died by suicide at age 33, by an overdose of tricyclic antidepressant anafranil, paracetamol and alcohol at her home in Walton-on-the-Hill, Surrey on 19 August 1979. Her husband found her dead in her bed. She left four suicide notes which were found near her body. In one of them, she had written: "The police have framed me yet again. They frighten me so much. I can't face the thought of prison... The Nazi tax man has finished me as well." In another note, to her solicitor Michael Kaye (partly published in Private magazine no 59), Millington wrote "the police have killed me with their threats…the police have made my life a misery with frame ups. The tax man has hounded me so much – I will be made bankrupt, he mustn't get anything of his £200,000 demands. He is a religious maniac." In another note, to David Sullivan, she wrote: "please print in your magazines how much I want porn to be legalised, but the police have beaten me."

In the mid 1970s, Millington became one of the earliest members of the English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP) and of the National Campaign for the Reform of the Obscene Publications Acts (NCROPA), with Millington encouraging her readers to demand the abolition of the Acts. From the late 1970s, NCROPA was affiliated to the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL). After Millington's death in August 1979, NCROPA founder David Webb wrote: "Mary was a dear, kind person and we much admired her courage in standing up to the bigotry and repression which still so pervades the establishment of this country. She obviously had tremendous pressures put on her as a result and there is no doubt in my mind that these must have contributed to this tragedy."

Millington was buried at St Mary Magdalene Church, in South Holmwood, Surrey, marked by a grey granite tombstone which bears her married name. She is buried in the same grave as her mother, Joan Quilter, who died in 1976. In 1996, Channel Four screened a tribute to her entitled Sex and Fame: The Mary Millington Story, featuring an interview with David Sullivan.

Twenty years after her death, the author and film historian Simon Sheridan put Millington's life into context in the biography Come Play with Me: The Life and Films of Mary Millington. Further information about her career can be found in Sheridan's follow-up book Keeping the British End Up: Four Decades of Saucy Cinema, the fourth edition of which was published in April 2011.

In 2004, Millington's prominence was recognised by her inclusion in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by Colin Matthew and Brian Harrison. Her entry was written by Richard Davenport-Hines.

In 2008, an exhibition of the work of the late glamour photographer Fred Grierson was held in London, which included several little-seen pictures of Millington taken by Grierson at June Palmer's Strobe Studios in the early 1970s.

In late 2009, an 8 mm copy of one of her early John Lindsay short films Special Assignment resurfaced. Unseen since the early 1970s, it was subsequently transferred to DVD. Two years later in 2011, Wild Lovers, another 8 mm film starring Millington, was also traced and transferred from 8 mm to DVD.

In 2014, four spoken word erotic stories recorded by Millington from 1978 to 1979 were released as a vinyl LP.

A nightclub in Liverpool is named after her. Nevertheless, Come Play With Me stands as one of the longest-running films in British movie history.

Respectable – The Mary Millington Story (2016)

A feature-length documentary chronicling Millington's life, Respectable – The Mary Millington Story, was released in 2016. Written, directed and produced by Millington's biographer Simon Sheridan, the film mixes archive footage, previously unseen photographs and interviews with Millington's family, friends and co-stars, including David Sullivan, Pat Astley, Dudley Sutton, Linzi Drew and Maureen Flanagan. The film received its world premiere at London's Regent Street Cinema in April 2016. A DVD was released in the UK on 2 May 2016.

Selected filmography

Miss Bohrloch (short, 1970)
Oh, Nurse! (short, 1971)
Oral Connection (1971)
Betrayed (short, 1971)
Special Assignment (1971)
Secrets of a Door-to-Door Salesman (1973)
Response (1974)
Love Games (1974)
Wild Lovers (1974)
Party Pieces (1975)
Eskimo Nell (1975)
Erotic Inferno (1975)
Private Pleasures (shot in Sweden, 1975)
Keep It Up Downstairs (1976)
I'm Not Feeling Myself Tonight (1976)
Intimate Games (1976)
Come Play with Me (1977)
The Playbirds (1978)
What's Up Superdoc! (1978)
Confessions from the David Galaxy Affair (1979)
Queen of the Blues (1979)
The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (posthumous, 1980)
Mary Millington's True Blue Confessions (posthumous, 1980)
Mary Millington's World Striptease Extravaganza (posthumous, 1981)
Sex and Fame: The Mary Millington Story (TV documentary, 1996)
Respectable – The Mary Millington Story (cinema documentary, 2016)

Selected magazine appearances

Frivol No.37 (German magazine) "The Summit of Bliss" (Miss Bohrloch stills) 1970
Frivol No.40 & 41 (German magazine) Miss Bohrloch stills 1970
Vi Menn No. 233 (Norwegian magazine) as "Sally Stephens" Britiske Kvinner stillbilder 1970
Krydder (Norwegian magazine) as "Sally Stephens" 1970
Vibrations Vol 5 No 12 as "Sally Stevens" & "Jean" in photo-story 'Erotic Charades' 1970
Men Only Vol 36 No 10 as "Sally Stephens" 1971
Vibrations Vol 8 No 8 as "Sally Stephens" 1971
Vibrations Vol 9 No 2 as "Sally Stevens" 1972
Men Only Vol 37 No 12 as "Rebecca Stephens" 1972
Vi Menn No. 260 (Norwegian magazine) as "Rebecca Stephens" Britiske Kvinner stillbilder 1972
Vi Menn No. 266 (Norwegian magazine) as "Rebecca Stephens" Britiske Kvinner stillbilder 1973
Vi Menn No. 268 (Norwegian magazine) as "Rebecca Stephens" Britiske Kvinner stillbilder 1973
Men Only Vol 39 No 1 as "Janet Green" 1974
Late Night Extra 1974 (as "Nancy Astley")
Around the World in 80 Lays (volumes 1 & 2) photo-novel by Beryl Grant 1974 (cover)
Knave Vol.6 No.3 1974 (Cover & 8 pages inside - centerfold)
Fiesta Vol.8 No.6 1974
Titbits No.4613, 1– 7 August 1974, (Eskimo Nell)
Fiesta Vol 8 no 5 1974 inside photograph of Mary on the London Underground
Spick No.261 August 1975 (as "Mary Maxted")
Whitehouse No.10 1975
Playbirds Vol.1, No.1 1975
Playbirds Vol.1, No.2 1975 (cover & 15 pages)
Playbirds Vol.1, No.3 & 4 1975
Playbirds Vol.1, No.6 1975
Playbirds Vol.1, No.8 1975 (Millington at the Frankfurt trade fair)
Club International Vol.5, No.1, January 1976 (5 pages as "Mia" with Pat Astley)
Playbirds Vol.1, No.16 1976 (cover & inside)
Playbirds Vol.1, No 21 1976 (cover only)
Playbirds Vol.1, No 24 1976 (inside)
Private No. 51 (Swedish magazine) 1977
Private No. 52 (Swedish magazine) 1977
Whitehouse No.40 1978 (colour trade ad for Playbirds film & four-page synopsis)
Continental Film Review Vol.25, No.6 & 7, 1978 (The Playbirds)
New Action MS no. 28 1978 (Millington meets Rosemary England photo shoot)
Playbirds erotic film guide No.1 1978 (Millington cover, Come Play with Me feature)
Exciting Cinema No.18 circa 1978 ("Mary Millington meets Rosemarie England in the Flesh")
International Cover Girls No.14 1978
Whitehouse No.47 1979 (colour trade ad for The David Galaxy Affair plus four-page article on film)
Revel No. 3 (tribute to Millington, posthumous) 1980

<small>* David Sullivan's magazines were often undated, thus the only way of dating them is by which Sullivan-produced films were being promoted inside the magazines, i.e. a Sullivan magazine which promotes Come Play With Me would be from 1976/1977, one promoting The Playbirds would be circa 1978, and one promoting Confessions from the David Galaxy Affair would be from 1979.</small>

Notes

References

External links

by Simon Sheridan
Simon Sheridan's website
Come Play With Me: The Life and Films of Mary Millington – book listing at publisher's website, archived in 2005