The Amazing Mary Millington

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Millington was a member of the National Campaign for the Reform of the Obscene Publications Acts (NCROPA) [19] [20] and encouraged her readers to demand the abolition of the Acts. [12] After her death, 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." [21] Respectable - The Mary Millington Story". BFI. Archived from the original on 23 February 2016 . Retrieved 3 April 2016. Come Play With Me was filmed during the autumn of 1976. Bovington Manor was in reality the Weston Manor Hotel, near Oxford. Owing to work commitments, Suzy Mandel was absent from the scene that introduces the girls travelling to Bovington Manor onboard a coach (she was taping a Benny Hill episode at the time).

Confessions of a Pixie – an interview with Josie Harrison Marks, the daughter of Come Play With Me’s director George Harrison Marks. A feature-length documentary chronicling Millington's life, entitled Respectable – The Mary Millington Story, [31] [32] [33] was partly shot and produced at Pinewood Studios in 2015.The Mary Millington Movie Collection’ Limited Edition Blu-Ray Box-Set (Screenbound Pictures) released 22 June 2020. You don't really hear the word much 'sexploitation' anymore, but it's just a by-product of 'exploitation' - films predominantly made in the 1960s and 1970s that exploited a certain element of storytelling to engage the cinemagoers' attention. At the time, British filmmakers needed to offer the public something they couldn't see on TV - and this tended to be material which wasn't allowed on the small screen - namely violence, horror, martial arts and sex. In the 1970s British films were a lot tamer than European fare. Hardcore porn movies played mainstream cinemas on the continent, whereas in the UK it was a slightly different story. 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. [26] It’s a sex comedy that’s neither sexy nor particularly comical, with the blame laying squarely between producer David Sullivan – who supplied the readies – and writer/director George Harrison Marks, the former king of the ‘nudie pics’, who litters the film with antiquarian music hall gags, a cheesy song’n’dance number and mugs shamelessly in the lead role defacto as Cornelius Cornworthy. It’s no Eskimo Nell. However, 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 medications and vodka when she was 33 years-old.

Sheridan, Simon (18 March 2016). "Come Play with Mary on DVD". Mary Millington . Retrieved 12 January 2021. We also have Queen Of The Blues (1979) and posthumous film Mary Millington's True Blue Confessions ( 1980), which is the most eye-opening of the lot. The set also contains my 2015 movie Respectable: The Mary Millington Story, in which I chronicled her amazing life through interviews with her family, friends, lovers and co-stars. I think it's a nice bookend to Mary's career and I'm very proud that it's part of the set.Come Play With Me: Part 3 (1982): unrelated Swiss sex film again directed by Dietrich, re-titled by Tigon and David Sullivan and promoted as a second "sequel" to the earlier film. No such caveats for the last major feature film in this collection, Confessions Of The David Galaxy Affair. In The Playbirds it’s fair to say that Alan Lake’s charisma was put to great use, and he visibly relishes every scene he appears in, with charming brio; by comparison, Confessions Of The David Galaxy Affair is what happens when you give your lead actor free rein for all his most appalling excesses – problematic ain’t the word for some of ‘em – and Millington’s character barely troubles the narrative. A sad, depressing film, released two months prior to Millington’s suicide, and Lake’s last lead role before his tragic death by his own hand in 1984, Confessions Of The David Galaxy Affair is the twitching corpse of the British sex comedy at a time when its star had fallen, Columbia having pulled the plug on the Confessions series a year earlier. One wonders if the cunning stunts of Michael Armstrong or David McGillivray could have salvaged this turkey, but it’s doubtful. It’s sad to see the potential of The Playbirds squandered in this embarrassing dud – even Lake’s missus, the wonderful Diana Dors, phones it in.

The release also gave me an opportunity to make some new documentary shorts, all of which relate to aspects of Mary's life: there are eight new documentaries, including Mary Millington On Location, which looks at the places she made the films; a look at audio recordings she made in 1977, called Aural Sex; plus new interviews with co-star Sally Faulkner, veteran glamour photographer George Richardson, and Josie Harrison Marks, who is the daughter of Come Play With Me's director. There's even a documentary on how I made Respectable. So there's something for everybody, I hope. Mary Ruth Maxted (née Quilter; [1] [2] 30 November 1945– 19 August 1979), known professionally as Mary Millington from 1974 onwards, was an English model and pornographic actress. Her appearance in the short softcore film Sex is My Business led to her meeting with magazine publisher David Sullivan, who promoted her widely as a model and featured her in the softcore comedy Come Play With Me, which ran for a record-breaking four years at the same cinema.

Simon Sheridan - Come Play With Me: The Life And Films Of Mary Millington

In 2004, Millington's prominence was recognized by her inclusion in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, [27] edited by Colin Matthew and Brian Harrison. Her entry was written by Richard Davenport-Hines. Mary was actually a former veterinary nurse from Surrey, who stumbled into pornography quite accidentally; initially the hardcore variety and then softcore, which is not the usual career trajectory for actresses in that business. She had few inhibitions about sex and nudity, and after making some immensely successful 8mm films in Germany and The Netherlands, Mary began a relationship with publisher David Sullivan, who promoted her relentlessly in his stable of magazines, the most famous of which was Whitehouse - a cheeky sideswipe at Mary Whitehouse, the infamous pro-censorship campaigner. By the mid-1970s Mary started securing small supporting roles in British comedies like Eskimo Nell ( 1975) and Keep It Up Downstairs ( 1976). With Sullivan's help she soon elevated to more significant 'above the title' roles in Come Play With Me ( 1977) and The Playbirds ( 1978). That's how she gained a much wider audience. The wonderful Irene Handl plays the matriarch of the establishment and there's a host of other very well-loved comedy names in attendance, such as Tommy Godfrey, Alfie Bass, Bob Todd, Henry McGee and Rita Webb. And the young actresses, like Mary Millington, are all dressed in nurses' outfits (naturally) and cavort with the old-timers. It's quite a spectacle!