In Britain in the 1970s, Mary Millington was close to the epicenter of a certain kind of fame. By the time she was thirty-three, she was one of the most well-known faces in British glamour cinema, the star of a movie that ran for years in a single Soho theater, and the face of a small empire of s** shops that David Sullivan was hard at work creating. Nevertheless, her estranged husband discovered her dead when he entered a bedroom in Walton-on-the-Hill, Surrey, early on August 19, 1979. Anafranil, paracetamol, and vodka overdose was the official cause of death. She was obviously aware that this combination was nearly certain to be deadly.
Looking back, it’s easy to imagine her demise as abrupt. It wasn’t. The months that preceded that morning read like a slow, public unraveling, observed by everyone in her immediate vicinity but uninterrupted by anyone. In June, she was taken into custody for shoplifting. The day before she passed away, she was caught stealing a necklace. She received an unpaid tax bill from the Inland Revenue that was close to £200,000, which was a remarkable amount at the time. Her Norbury s**t shop was frequently raided. By that time, those closest to her were aware of her cocaine addiction. Reading the stories gives the impression that she was someone attempting to avoid a long list of issues that just kept getting worse.
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Full Name | Mary Ruth Maxted (née Quilter) |
| Known As | Mary Millington |
| Born | 30 November 1945, Kenton, Middlesex, England |
| Died | 19 August 1979, Walton-on-the-Hill, Surrey |
| Age at Death | 33 |
| Cause of Death | Suicide — overdose of Anafranil (tricyclic antidepressant), paracetamol, and alcohol |
| Profession | Model, glamour actress, businesswoman |
| Famous For | Come Play With Me (1977), one of Britain’s longest-running films |
| Husband | Robert Maxted |
| Mentor / Producer | David Sullivan |
The story is complicated by the fact that Mary was unstable long before she became famous, a fact that most retellings downplay. She was raised in what biographers describe as a hut in Kenton with her mother Joan after being born illegitimately in 1945. Because of her birth circumstances, she was teased at school. She was trained as a veterinary nurse, of all things, and if photographer John Lindsay hadn’t drawn her into modeling in the early 1970s, she might have had a modest, quiet life. There’s something almost nostalgic about that detail. She found her way to Sullivan from Lindsay, and the doors opened wide from Sullivan.
It was effective for a few years. Film historians like Allen Eyles argue that the true number is closer to 165 and that *South Pacific* had a longer run. *Come Play With Me* ran for 201 weeks at the Moulin in Soho, a record that is still up for debate. Records aside, Mary became well-known as a result of the film, which ran for years. She started stores. She organized fundraisers for the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals. She appeared at local movie theaters. She continued to work as a call girl, a career she had maintained since her modeling days, and she never appeared ashamed of it. According to the majority of accounts, she was essentially the same person in person as she appeared on screen and in print.
The antics became more daring. Everyone remembers the topless picture outside 10 Downing Street with a shocked policeman attempting to remove the film from the camera. According to Simon Sheridan’s biography, she was conditionally discharged and bound over for that. It now sounds like either a small cry for attention or rebellion, possibly both. After her mother passed away in 1976, she seemed to lose something. Friends observed the fluctuations in mood. Shortly after, Sullivan and I broke up. The drugs worsened. It was no longer possible to conceal the kleptomania, which had been a subtle undercurrent.
By her bed, she left four suicide notes. These are worn-out, resentful documents. She claimed in a letter to her attorney that the police had “killed me with their threats” and turned her life into “a misery with frame-ups.” She blamed the police for beating her down and asked Sullivan to continue publishing in his magazines how much she wanted pornography to be legalized in Britain. It’s difficult to read those notes without feeling that she thought she was being persecuted in her last hours and that no one in a position of authority could stop it.
The more complex and challenging question is whether the industry that produced her would actually allow her to age in it. By 1979, she was already being replaced by younger models. Her story is uncomfortable when one considers that the average life expectancy of a pornographic performer is approximately 31. Although there are numerous methodological issues with this statistic, the pattern it indicates is real. On camera, Mary Millington was gregarious, charismatic, and seemingly fearless. By all honest accounts, she was also a frail woman who had spent her adult life being observed by strangers but never fully acknowledged by those in her immediate vicinity.
In 2004, Richard Davenport-Hines wrote an entry for her in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, “A strange afterlife of respectability for someone who spent her career on the wrong side of British respectability.” She is now honored with a blue plaque on the site of the former Moulin Cinema. Her name is still on a nightclub in Liverpool. There is a sense that Britain has never quite figured out what to do with her memory, as evidenced by the numerous tributes that have accumulated over the years. She was the cautionary tale the nation found easier to tell after her passing and the s** symbol it couldn’t acknowledge wanting.
i) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Millington
ii) https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0291710/bio/
iii) https://discover.hubpages.com/entertainment/Mary-Millington-The-Tragic-Life-of-The-Sex-Goddess
iv) https://www.londonremembers.com/subjects/mary-millington