Her most famous film was Come Play With Me - almost a film genre all to itself! In a nutshell, the plot follows a couple of banknote forgers who are on the run. Hiding out at a stately home being run as a health farm, they find it is almost entirely staffed by sexy young women. There's an unexpected song and dance routine in the middle of the film, plus some fairly explicit sex scenes - certainly a world away from the likes of Carry On Camping! Sheridan, Simon. "The Mary Millington Movie Collection Limited Edition Blu-Ray Box-Set". Cinema Retro (Interview). Interviewed by Smith, Adrian. 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. Mary Millington was a pretty English girl-next-door who personified the word ‘glamour’. Her meteoric rise to the top was scandalous and controversial. She became the most famous pin-up of the decade and her racy reputation could shift a million newspapers and sell the longest-running British movie of all-time. Mary’s fame brought her a lavish lifestyle and an affair with a serving Prime Minister. Her sexuality was accessible and her personality addictive, but her sexual bravado hid a darker side. Persecuted by the authorities, Mary was tortured by self-doubt and she sadly died at the height of her fame in August 1979, aged 33. Filmed on location in London and at Pinewood Studios, Simon Sheridan’s documentary reveals the truth behind an icon. 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]

Upton, Julian (2004). Fallen stars: tragic lives and lost careers. Headpress/Critical Vision. ISBN 9781900486385. 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. In April 1978, Millington and fellow Come Play With Me actress Suzy Mandel took part in a publicity stunt for the anniversary of the opening of the film at the Moulin Cinema, posing in lingerie on the cinema's marquee. [15] 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". [1]

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If you are in Australia or New Zealand (DVD Region 4), note that almost all DVDs distributed in the UK by the BBC and 2entertain are encoded for both Region 2 and Region 4. The UK and Australasia are in the same Blu-ray region (B). Sheridan, Simon (2011). Keeping the British End Up: Four Decades of Saucy Cinema (fourthed.). Titan Publishing. ISBN 9780857682796. Birth name cited at "Millington, Mary". BFI Film & TV Database. Archived from the original on 26 January 2009. Sheridan, Simon (30 November 2015). "Teaser Trailer for 'Respectable: The Mary Millington Story' ". Simon Sheridan . Retrieved 3 April 2016. The Talking Pictures TV And Renown Pictures Festival Of Film St Albans Arena 16th and 17th March 2024

Respectable: The Mary Millington Story ( 2015), an in-depth documentary chronicling her extraordinary life 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] 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. Something wrong? Let us know! Respectable: The Mary Millington Story streaming: where to watch online? Extras: Audio Commentary. Sam Dunn from the BFI discusses the making of Respectable with its writer/director/producer, Simon Sheridan.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. [ citation needed] The film received its world premiere at London's Regent Street Cinema in April 2016. [34] A DVD of the film was released in the UK on 2 May 2016. [35] Selected filmography [ edit ] 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. Simon Sheridan is a writer, broadcaster and filmmaker, as well as being Mary Millington's biographer. He is the world's leading authority on British sexploitation cinema and has written several books on the subject, including Come Play With Me: The Life And Films Of Mary Millington, X-Rated and Keeping The British End Up.

Millington's story is somewhat akin to that of Marilyn Monroe's; a beautiful starlet who transcended her chosen medium and, is it said, developed relationships and links that went to the very top (the rumour of affairs with multimillionaires and even the then PM, Harold Wilson, is explored here). Like Monroe however, Millington's private life was riddled with tragedy. Following the death of her mother after a ten year battle with cancer in 1976, Millington's life began to unravel. Cocaine addiction, pronounced kleptomania and debilitating neurosis and depression, the breakdown of her marriage to Bob Maxted, the persistent interest from the police and the taxman into her business affairs and the combined fear of going to prison and bankruptcy led to Millington taking her own life on the 19th August 1979. She was just 33. In 2014, four spoken word erotic stories recorded by Millington in 1978–9 were released as a vinyl LP. [28] Of course, Mary was only one of many involved in the 'sexploitation' sex comedies of the 1970s - perhaps the most culturally important, but still one of many. And there are plenty of other great, or not-so-great but similarly important, films in the genre too, which I'd love to celebrate in future. So many! I have plans for something very, very special next year, but you'll just have to wait for now. It's going to be the project I have always wanted to do. Maybe then I can retire from the world of 1970s' sex comedies forever!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.