Respectable - The Mary Millington Story [DVD]

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Keep It Up, Sue! In Conversation with Sue Longhurst. Mary Millington’s co-star Sue Longhurst talks about her career in saucy British sex comedies and recalls the making of Come Play with Me. Confessions from the David Sullivan Affair. Film producer David Sullivan chats about life with girlfriend Mary Millington, as well as exclusively revealing a self-portrait Mary gave him in 1977. 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] As a new Blu-ray box set collating her films is released, its curator and her biographer, Simon Sheridan, explains all about Mary Millington, a pioneering personality of the 1970s. Extras: Audio Commentary. Sam Dunn from the BFI discusses the making of Respectable with its writer/director/producer, Simon Sheridan.

Mary was actually a former veterinary nurse from Surrey, who stumbled into pornography quite accidentally; initially the hardcore variety and then softcore, which is not the usual career trajectory for actresses in that business. She had few inhibitions about sex and nudity, and after making some immensely successful 8mm films in Germany and The Netherlands, Mary began a relationship with publisher David Sullivan, who promoted her relentlessly in his stable of magazines, the most famous of which was Whitehouse - a cheeky sideswipe at Mary Whitehouse, the infamous pro-censorship campaigner. By the mid-1970s Mary started securing small supporting roles in British comedies like Eskimo Nell ( 1975) and Keep It Up Downstairs ( 1976). With Sullivan's help she soon elevated to more significant 'above the title' roles in Come Play With Me ( 1977) and The Playbirds ( 1978). That's how she gained a much wider audience. We also have Queen Of The Blues (1979) and posthumous film Mary Millington's True Blue Confessions ( 1980), which is the most eye-opening of the lot. The set also contains my 2015 movie Respectable: The Mary Millington Story, in which I chronicled her amazing life through interviews with her family, friends, lovers and co-stars. I think it's a nice bookend to Mary's career and I'm very proud that it's part of the set. Respectable: The Mary Millington Story". Regent Street Cinema. Archived from the original on 16 April 2016 . Retrieved 3 April 2016. But as with everything, tastes change in British comedy, and they definitely did in the late-1970s. The fourth and final Confessions film was released in 1977, with the final in the original run of Carry On movies the year after. TV audiences were also huge at this point in time. People were tiring of traipsing out to the local ODEON to watch sex comedies, preferring to stay at home to watch The Benny Hill Show instead. 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]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] 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. Sheridan, Simon (18 March 2016). "Come Play with Mary on DVD". Mary Millington . Retrieved 12 January 2021. 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. McGillivray, David (2017). Doing rude things: the history of the British sex film, 1957-1981 (2nded.). Wolfbait. ISBN 978-1999744151.

Birth name cited at "Millington, Mary". BFI Film & TV Database. Archived from the original on 26 January 2009.

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] 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. 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. Soon after becoming a glamour model, she met the glamour photographer and pornographer John Jesnor Lindsay, who offered to photograph her for softcore magazines. She became one of his most popular models [4] and began appearing in 8mm hardcore pornographic film loops which sold well in Europe. [3] One of her first films was Miss Bohrloch [a] in 1970. [3] Miss Bohrloch won the Golden Phallus Award at the Wet Dream Festival held in November 1970 in Amsterdam. [8] She starred in around twenty short hardcore films for John Lindsay, [9] although only five ( Miss Bohrloch, Oral Connection, Betrayed, Oh Nurse and Special Assignment) have so far resurfaced. She then returned to modelling for British pornographic magazines such as Knave and Men Only. [9] She also appeared in softcore short films by Russell Gay ( Response, 1974), Mountain Films ( Love Games, Wild Lovers) and Harrison Marks ( Sex is My Business, c.1974). [10]

Released to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Mary Millington's death, this special edition Blu-ray box set (individually numbered and limited to 3,000 units) features Mary's most glamorous film roles, with new, stunning 2K restorations, including: 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. 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 ] Written, directed and produced by Mary Millington's biographer Simon Sheridan, the film mixes archive footage, previously unseen photographs and interviews with Millington's family, friends and co-stars, including David Sullivan, Pat Astley, Dudley Sutton, Linzi Drew and Flanagan. 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.Party Pieces 1974 Mary Millington film. A short film, once presumed lost, with a young Mary Millington. Originally released on 8mm without sound, it was digitally restored at Pinewood Studios. I've been fascinated by Mary Millington's life and career since I was a child in the 1970s. I always recall seeing her image on cinema posters when I was very young and wondering who this beautiful blonde woman was. Even at a formative age I knew she was an 'adult actress', but couldn't quite understand how TV favourites like Diana Dors and Irene Handl were co-starring with her in naughty big-screen comedies.