I can’t see the feminist movement being happy with a porn star receiving a Blue Plaque which must be a first for someone in at profession to receive such a honour. The award is going to 1970s porn star Mary Millington who along with Fiona Richmond with the biggest British porn stars of the seventies.
Growing up without her father in her life, she was often bullied at school and had few friends. Then found that sex made her popular with the boys she married young at 18-years-old and then spent more than ten years nursing her terminally ill mother. Her move into porn began to help fund her mother's care after initially becoming a glamour model in the late 1960s and found herself gradually moving into hard-core porn. She made short 8mm films before returning to glamour modelling for British pornographic magazines.
She met and had an affair with adult magazine publisher David Sullivan (now chairman of West Ham) although she was still married. He rebranded her as Mary Millington and made her a major feature in a number of his top shelf-magazines. Her films were more like British sex comedies, more soft porn than hard-core although the have been rumours of hard-core versions for a continental market. Hard-core films where banned in Britain so it was normal in some cases to do a soft version for the UK market.
Some would be surprised by some of her co-stars like in ‘Keep it up Downstairs’ there your known British stars like Diana Dors star of TV and Film and Jack Wild (Artful Dodger). Others she worked with in other films Roy Kinnear and Christopher Timothy.
Her most famous movie was ‘Come Play with Me’ again with some British TV legends Irene Handl, Alfie Bass, and Ronald Fraser. She only had a small part in the film but she is the one people remember when you mention the film. It must have been her dominance in all the advertising of the film.
The film is in the Guinness Book of Records for its continuously showing at the Moulin Cinema in London's West End from April 1977 to March 1981.
Millington gained notoriety when she was photographed topless outside 10 Downing Street. While posing with a policeman outside Number Ten, she decided to unzip her top, exposing her breasts for the photograph, much to the surprise of those present.
Mary had been working as an escort, and claimed to have had a string of high-profile lovers including the then Prime Minister Harold Wilson.
Despite her incredible success, which saw her named as one of the hottest British sex film stars of the 1970s, she killed herself at her Surrey mansion in 1979 at the age of 33 after battling depression and a drug addiction.
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