Victoria Vetri

This voluptuous dark-haired Italian beauty was named Playmate of the Year in May '68, then a year later she starred in the fantasy epic When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth.
Model, Movie Star, and TV Star

BIRTH: She was born in '44, making her a curvaceous fifteen as the decade started and a prime 23 when she was named Playmate of the Year. Her exotic birthplace: San Francisco, California.

IMPACT ON THE '60s: Hers was not much of a Hollywood career, but you've gotta respect that Playboy exposure. One of the magazine's most popular Playmates, she went by the name Angela Dorian (a take-off on the famous Italian liner, Andrea Doria) and appeared in Playboy in the following months: January, April, June, November, and December of '68, November and December of '69, June, November and December of '71, November of '72, January and August of '74, May of '76, June of '79, and April '84. Of the 150+ Swingin' Chicks on this site, she's one of the only Playmates of the Month (lovely Stella Stevens was also one), and Victoria's one of only two Playmates of the Year (sweet Lisa Baker is the other). In '69, filming began on When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. This stop-motion epic was a clear attempt by Hammer Films to jump on the bikini bandwagon of their earlier hit, One Million Years B.C., which helped make a half-dressed Raquel Welch an international sex symbol. Using her real name in the credits and playing a sexy blonde cave girl called Sanna, Victoria (and the other characters) spoke a primitive 27-word vocabulary in service to the Oscar-nominated special visual effects. Victoria looked amazing, as usual. And Hollywood legend has it that her screen test for When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth was shot by budding director Francis Ford Coppola.

CAREER IN THE '60s: Victoria was around for a surprisingly long time, considering that most Playmates have no real career before or after their Playboy coronation. She was first spotted by a talent scout who saw her when she was attending Hollywood High in L.A. and got her to audition unsuccessfully for the film version of West Side Story (had she gotten the part, she would've dubbed Natalie Wood's singing). Victoria's first film was '63's Kings of the Sun, followed by '67's Chuka: The Gunfighter, and a brief appearance in '68's Rosemary's Baby with short-haired screamer Mia Farrow. In that horror classic Victoria appears after thirteen minutes for a three-minute scene with Mia that includes this peculiar exchange:

Mia: "I'm sorry, I thought you were Victoria Vetri, the actress."

Victoria: "S'all right, a lot of people think I'm Victoria, I don't see any resemblance."

Mia: "Do you know her?"

Victoria: "No."

Two minutes later, Victoria's found dead outside Manhattan's Dakot building. Besides movies Victoria had lots of guest shots on TV shows, including "Wagon Train" in '64 and '65, "Perry Mason" in '65, "The Big Valley" in '66, "Hogan's Heroes" in '67, and as the belly-dancing Florence of Arabia on "Batman" in '68. She may have made a major career gaffe when she was offered the part of Lolita in Kubrick's famous film but she turned it down, and the part made a sensation out of Sue Lyon.

CAREER OUTSIDE THE '60s: Born in '44 to a father who was a prominent L.A. restaurateur and a mother who had sung on Broadway, Victoria Vetri was first spotted by a Hollywood talent scout while attending Hollywood High in L.A. She auditioned unsuccessfully for the film version of West Side Story, but she did get named Four Star Television's "Deb Star of 1962," and her movie career soon picked up steam. After the '60s, more B movies followed, including '72's Group Marriage and '73's Invasion of the Bee Girls (which was rereleased in '83 as Graveyard Tramps), plus some TV appearances in the '70s, including "Mission Impossible," "The Smothers Brothers," "Run for Your Life," two guest shots on "The Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson, and commercials for Mercury Cougar and Groom 'n' Clean. According to some reports, late in the '70s Victoria was working as a waitress in a popular watering hole near UCLA (the Moustache Cafe), trying to save money to produce a movie.

TALENT: Victoria could do more than just look good, though usually that's all she was asked to do. She studied art at Los Angeles City College and UCLA in the early '60s. She was a jazz and ballet dancer, she wrote songs and played the guitar, and she showed off her musical skills in a '66 episode of "The Big Valley" in which she sang a Spanish folk song. As if all that weren't enough, she's fluent in Italian -- mama mia!)



LIFESTYLE: Supposedly she was married in '67 to interior design consultant John Hage, and then two more times after that, though confirmation is hard to come by. We do have a reliable report that she has a son named Bret who was born in '64. Sadly, we hear she was the victim of a brutal attack in her house in Hollywood in 1980, suffering a broken nose and broken ribs. The two assailants were never caught. By the way, here's the lifestyle information she provided about herself for the data sheet that ran with with her Playboy centerfold: Turn-ons include men, sports cars, and cats. Turn-offs are women who wear hair curlers in public, and the person she admires most = Audrey Hepburn (thanks to Playboy expert/collector Lester Isa for these Playboy nuggets).

EXTRAS: Her father's L.A. restaurants included Vetri's on toney La Cienega Blvd. and the Sunset Inn in Hollywood ... her mother, Cesarina Liberatori, had sung on Broadway ... in her first guest shot on "The Tonight Show" she was introduced as Angela Dorian, then for her second appearance two years later she was introduced as Victoria Vetri ... during one of the Playboy photo sessions, she was reclining in a hammock for one of the pictures, but it gave way and she suffered two broken ribs ... she was also featured in the popular L.A. Reader weekly paper in '81 for an article entitled "When Playmates Ruled the Earth" ... in the When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth story, Victoria's character Sanna is blamed by the Shell Tribe for the birth of the "evil" moon, an event we witness when there's a strange fire in the sky ... during her long escape from the Shells, she befriends a cute baby dinosaur ... some critics believe that several racy scenes were shot for the film but were edited out ... the fine stop-motion animation dinos in When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth brought the film an Oscar nomination for special visual effects, but the Oscar went to Disney's Bedknobs and Broomsticks ... Victoria loves fast cars and car racing, and in her time she's owned a Porsche, a Sprite, and the pink AMX she won as Playmate of the Year in '68