Dorothy Stratten

At 20 years old, Dorothy Stratten has this physical status:

Life and career

Dorothy Stratten was born in Grace Maternity Hospital in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, on February 28, 1960, to Simon and Nelly Hoogstraten, who had immigrated from the Netherlands. In 1961, her brother John Arthur Arthur was born; her sister Louise followed in May 1968.

Stratten was attending Centennial High School in Coquitlam in 1977. She was working part-time at a local Dairy Queen, where she met 26-year-old Vancouver-area club promoter and pimp Paul Snider, who started dating her. Snider had a photographer take professional nude photos of Stratten, which were then sent to Playboy magazine in 1978. She was under the age of 19 (the British Columbia legal age of majority), so she had to convince her mother to sign the model release form.

Stratten moved to Los Angeles, California, United States, where she was chosen as a finalist for the 25th Anniversary Great Playmate Hunt in August 1978. Snider and her partner married in June the following year. Miss August 1979, she became Playboy's Miss August 1979 and began working as a bunny at the Playboy Club in Century City, Los Angeles, with her surname reduced to Stratten. Hugh Hefner had a trepidation of Stratten's aspirations as an actor. In 1979, she appeared in episodes of Buck Rogers and Fantasy Island. She appeared in the films Americathon, the roller disco comedy Skatetown, U.S.A., and a lead role in the exploitation film Autumn Born in 1979.

According to reports, Hefner encouraged Stratten to break ties with Snider, describing him as a "hustler and a pimp." Rosanne Katon and others notified Stratten of Snider's behavior. Several of Stratten's current coworkers, including Pamela Bryant, Gail Stanton, and Marcy Hanson, befriended him and shielded her from several of Hefner's acquaintances, whom they regarded as sexual predators.

Stratten returned to New York City on March 22, 1980, for her last film project, They All Laughed (1981), a romantic comedy directed by Peter Bogdanovich. Laughed will be Stratten's fifth film in a career that began the year and portrayed her first significant role in a big-budget film, portraying John Ritter, one of the film's stars, in an unhappily-married love affair. In an interview with Bogdanovich, who also wrote the screenplay, said he had based Stratten's backstory on what he had learned about her marriage to Snider. Stratten and Bogdanovich began an affair during the production.

Stratten had spent the first two and a half months of 1980 filming her Playmate of the Year film and making her last film, Galaxina, in southern California. Snider, as well as her ersatz manager and acting coach, were all located close to home. Nevertheless, Snider's near-constant presence, as well as his critique and almost daily arguments with his wife, caused Stratten so much stress that her coworkers at Playboy and the Galaxina set were alerted of the marital breakdown. As the spring 1980s approached, Snider insisted on accompanying his wife to New York for the shoot for They All Laughed, but Stratten was aware of the risks he could cause on time and wanted to continue her friendship with Bogdanovich. After explaining that the filmmaker had decided to close the film to only the cast and immediate crew, Stratten persuaded Snider to remain in Los Angeles. Stratten and Bogdanovich ended their affair on the day after she arrived in New York.

Stratten returned to California in April for a short time as the Year's New Playmate and follow-on publicity tour. With many months of filming to be finished in New York, this was the last time she would live with Snider in their Los Angeles-area home.

Stratten was unveiled on Wednesday, April 30, during a luncheon held on the grounds of the Playboy Mansion as the 1980 Playmate of the Year. Hefner said in his opening remarks that Stratten was from Canada and had received $200,000 in cash and gifts in addition to his title. In a fleeting comment, he acknowledged the effect that Stratten's charming blend of beauty, intelligence, and sensitivity had on many people who knew her," he said. "And she is something very special." They always are, but Dorothy is especially special." After taking the lectern, Stratten thanked Mario Casilli, the photographer who shot both her Playmate of the Month and Year pictorials, several Playboy executives, and then Hefner, who, "has made me probably the happiest girl in the world today." Stratten appeared on NBC's The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson later that evening.

Stratten's two-week promotional tour in Canada began the next day. She flew to New York on a whim to surprise Bogdanovich despite no planned activities over the first weekend. Stratten wrote to Snider from Canada, asking for more autonomy in their marriage. Snider phoned Los Angeles in reaction, but went into a rage when Stratten answered, with his wife out of his immediate control and afraid of the worst. Stratten's tour was arranged to end in Vancouver, so the actress may take a few days with her family before returning to New York. However, Snider arrived in Vancouver at the last minute and coerced her into spending some of her brief vacation at several local nightclubs. Since Snider knew many of the club's owners, he personally negotiated and collected Stratten's appearance fees and then billed the full amount when she returned to New York. Stratten and Snider had a particularly tense conversation at this time, according to reports. Stratten suggested that the couple permanently return to Canada at some point during the war, but Snider denied his wife's attempt to save their marriage.

He found it increasingly difficult to contact Stratten in the days and weeks after Snider returned to Los Angeles. Snider's first wedding anniversary was sent in late June by Stratten, this one announcing that they were now physically and financially separated. Snider had several responses to the second letter; he denied the couples' joint bank account, had a brief affair with an old woman, and was convinced that Stratten was having an affair of her own with Bogdanovich.

Snider, a foreign national living in the United States without a green card that will allow him to work and having no other source of regular income, was relying on Stratten, now through her company manager, to pay the monthly household bill. Only a few hundred dollars were left over for extravagances, such as the costs incurred by a private detective who was on a case that was 3,000 miles from home. Snider began selling Stratten's Playmate of the Year awards over the summer of 1980, the most notable of which being a Jaguar sportscar that Playboy had valued at $26,000.

Their All Laughed photography on They All Laughed was completed and the New York production was wrapped by mid-July. Stratten and Bogdanovich returned to Los Angeles on Wednesday, after enjoying a ten-day holiday in England together. Stratten's official Los Angeles home was now at the address of a newly rented Beverly Hills apartment, but she had secretly migrated into Bogdanovich's Bel Air mansion.

Snider, who was then aware that his estranged wife was back in Los Angeles and living with Bogdanovich, hid among the shadows just outside the director's house with a borrowed handgun, ready to kill anyone who appeared at the door. Snider, who had been inactive for many hours, grew impatient and left, pushed up into the hills overlooking the city, and later told a friend that he had suicide in mind.

Stratten and Snider met for the first time in nearly three months at Snider (and Stratten's former) house in West Los Angeles around noon on Friday, August 8. Snider was overconfident before the meeting that he had already persuaded Stratten to pose for Playboy and then marry him, and that he would eventually convince his wife to let him go home. But when Stratten confessed to falling in love with Bogdanovich and wanted to announce their split, she was quickly dismissed. A dejected Snider decided to meet Stratten one more time the next week to negotiate a monetary settlement. Snider had to return the borrowed weapon to its owner later that afternoon, less than a week before Stratten's murder. He will be devoted to getting another over the next five days.

The day after his meeting with Stratten, Snider, and the private detective he had recruited, he went to a local gun store on August 9. Snider begged the private detective to buy the weapon Snider wanted for him after being told that the store could not sell him a gun due to his Canadian citizenship; the detective refused. When Snider saw the private detective again the next day, he tried to convince the man to buy a machine gun for "home defense," but the detective refused to recommend it. Snider carried out a pistol he had found on sale in a newspaper the next day. He became lost, but he eventually gave up and went home before finding the owner's name.

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