HUGH HEFNER

(9 April 1926 - 27 September 2017)

The American entrepreneur Hugh Marston Hefner, who has died aged 91 of natural causes, was mostly known as the publisher of Playboy magazine and the owner of a number of Playboy ‘bunny’ clubs where the female staff dressed as rabbits. He was also involved in producing TV and video documentaries of the models or ‘playmates’ featured in his publications. He released several of these every year from 1977 until 2008. However, he was also executive producer on many feature films for the cinema. In fact, he made cinema and TV films before his Playboy epics, the first being Roman Polanski’s Macbeth in 1971, in an adaptation by the director and Kenneth Tynan. He then produced a dramatised version of Desmond Morris’s book The Naked Ape, followed by Arthur Hiller’s The Crazy World of Julius Vrooder, Peter Bogdanovich’s Saint Jack with Ben Gazzara, and The Fiendish Plot of Dr Fu Manchu (1980) with Peter Sellers, the actor’s last film. Cut now through all the Playboy material until the 1990s when Hefner became involved in a series of TV documentaries about great silent film stars – Mary Pickford, Clara Bow, Theda Bara and Lon Chaney. In 2003 he produced Rita, a documentary on Rita Hayworth and then concentrated on more documentaries for the final decade of his life. As well as several ‘playmates’, Hugh Hefner had three wives, five partners and four children. He contributed to many charities in politics, publishing, animal welfare and conservation and was a perhaps surprising but fervent supporter of gay rights and same-sex marriage.

MICHAEL DARVELL