Respectable - The Mary Millington Story [DVD]

Product Information

Come Play with Me original 1977 trailer plus the British theatrical trailer for Come Play with Me, unseen for nearly 40 years.

In another note, to David Sullivan, she wrote: "please print in your magazines how much I want porn to be legalised, but the police have beaten me". If you are in the North America, look out for US/Canadian flag icons on popular product listings for direct links. Trivia: Did you know that Mary Millington's 1977 film Come Play With Me ran for a record breaking four years at the Moulin Cinema in London, finally closing after 201 weeks in 1981? 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. With Sullivan's help she soon elevated to more significant 'above the title' roles in Come Play With Me ( 1977) and The Playbirds ( 1978).The film is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as running there continuously for 201 weeks, from April 1977 to March 1981, making it the longest-running British film. The film was written and directed by Simon Sheridan, 41, Millington’s biographer and custodian of her archive. Millington’s journey to notoriety – she became a target for clean-up campaigner Mary Whitehouse – included making pornographic films on the continent and working as an escort. Hiding out at a stately home being run as a health farm, they find it is almost entirely staffed by sexy young women. 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 appeared in other sex movies such as Eskimo Nell (1975), Intimate Games (1976) and Derek Ford's What's Up Superdoc! 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.

David Sullivan described her as "the only really uninhibited, natural sex symbol that Britain ever produced and who believed in what she did". Millington's health and situation at the time all point to suicide, as do the detailed suicide notes and letters she left, yet the thorny issue of someone who wasn't just a teetotaler but also seemingly had an allergic reaction to alcohol deciding to wash down an overdose of the tricyclic antidepressant anafranil and paracetamol with vodka inevitably persists.

She had a small part in Sullivan's 1977 softcore sex comedy Come Play with Me, alongside Alfie Bass and Irene Handl. In November 1977, magistrates acquitted her and Sullivan following prosecution under the Obscene Publications Acts. Quilter had used many different stage names and aliases during her pornography career up to 1974, until Sullivan rebranded her as Mary Millington. While she was posing for an innocuous picture with a policeman, she decided to unzip her top and expose her breasts for the photograph. 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.

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.

He was the man behind Adventures Of A Taxi Driver, which when released in 1976 actually made more money in the UK than Martin Scorsese's own Taxi Driver!

She wanted to make as much money as she possibly could but she was naïve – always just on the wrong side of the law. Millington was buried at St Mary Magdalene Church, in South Holmwood, Surrey, marked by a grey granite tombstone which bears her married name. The film subsequently made its internet debut on 26 July 2008 at the (now defunct) site ZDD Visual Explosion. A tantalising orgy of extras that no self-respecting lover of Mary Millington or 1970s British sex comedies can but fail to be aroused by!