Madeleine and Mary Collinson: Playboy's First Identical Twin Playmates
In October 1970, Playboy put two identical faces on its cover instead of one and called them "twice blessed." Madeleine and Mary Collinson had been in Britain for barely eighteen months, hadn't landed a single credited film role yet, and still spoke English with accents thick enough that Hammer would later dub over both of them. None of that mattered. The magazine had never run a joint pairing of identical twins as its Playmates of the Month before, and more than fifty years later, it still hasn't happened again.
Their route to that centrefold started in Malta with no money, no father to speak of, and a glamour photographer's 8mm short film. It ended, a year and a bit later, with a Hammer horror film that only got made because a producer happened to flip through the right issue of Playboy.
Quick answers
● Who were Madeleine and Mary Collinson? Identical twins from Malta who became Playboy's Playmates of the Month for October 1970, the first time the magazine had paired identical twins in the role.
● Are they still the only identical twins to share the Playmate of the Month title? As far as the record shows, yes. No other pair of identical twins has been named joint Playmate of the Month since.
● What film did their Playboy spread lead to? Hammer's 1971 horror film Twins of Evil, retooled around the sisters after producer Harry Fine saw their pictorial.
● What happened to them afterwards? Both retired from modelling and film work by the mid-1970s. Madeleine died in Malta in 2014, and Mary died in Milan in 2021.
Two Maltese teenagers who arrived in Britain with nothing
Madeleine and Mary Collinson were born on 22 July 1952 in Sliema, Malta. Their father was a British sailor they never knew growing up, though the sisters later made contact with his family in Australia. Madeleine went to convent school, and by April 1969 the two of them had left Malta for London as, in the words of one obituary, penniless teenagers hoping to break into modelling with no connections and no real plan beyond trying.
Twins ran deep in their family, and not just the once. According to a piece of trivia Madeleine gave herself, twin births had turned up again and again on the Collinson side, and their own mother, a former model, went on to have a second set of twins after Madeleine and Mary were grown.
A saucy maid gig before Playboy ever came calling
Their first real break came from George Harrison Marks, the British glamour photographer who'd founded Kamera magazine with model Pamela Green in the 1950s and is credited with one of the earliest uses of the word "glamour" as a euphemism for nude modelling. Marks cast the twins as saucy maids in his 8mm short Halfway Inn, shot sometime between their arrival and July 1970, when a still from it turned up in a Marks advert running in that month's issue of Continental Film Review magazine. It wasn't glamorous work by any measure, but it put them in front of a camera and, crucially, in front of the right circles.
Twice Blessed: how one centrefold made Playboy history
By October 1970, Madeleine and Mary were on the cover of Playboy itself, in a pictorial titled "Twice Blessed," photographed by Dwight Hooker. It ran in a genuinely stacked issue: a five-page pictorial built around Elliott Gould, Paula Prentiss and Genevieve Waite's film Move, a spread on singer Lanie Kazan, and an interview with civil rights lawyer William Kunstler sitting alongside them.
Playboy had featured sisters before, but never a matched, identical pair sharing the Playmate of the Month title. That distinction is why the Collinson name still turns up whenever anyone runs down Playboy's list of firsts.
Nobody's matched it since
It's worth being precise about what the record actually is, because it gets blurred a lot. Shane and Sia Barbi, better known as the Barbi Twins, became huge Playboy cover stars from 1991 onwards, with Hugh Hefner reportedly putting up a billboard to promote one of their issues. But the Barbi Twins were never themselves named joint Playmate of the Month, they were cover models and recurring pictorial subjects.
Reneé Tenison, Playmate of the Year for 1990, has an identical twin sister, Rosie, who also modelled and posed alongside her in a 2002 pictorial, but Rosie was never named a Playmate herself. So the specific thing the Collinson sisters did, being named joint Playmate of the Month as an identical pair, hasn't happened since.
A run of small parts most people have forgotten
Twins of Evil gets all the attention, but it wasn't the twins' first film work, and it wasn't their only other credit either. One of the earliest is genuinely tangled: a British sex comedy shot in 1969 as Come Back Peter, then re-released in November 1976 under a different title, Some Like It Sexy, with the Collinson twins' scenes, including a lesbian encounter with the film's lead, edited into that later version alongside newly shot body-double sex scenes. Whether their footage was in the picture cinema audiences actually saw in 1969, or only surfaced in the 1976 re-cut, isn't something even IMDb's own notes on the film manage to pin down cleanly.
In 1970 they turned up twice more, both times uncredited. In Groupie Girl, they appear in a bizarre party scene where guests are paired off by assigned animal impersonations, with virtually no dialogue between them and only fleeting nudity to show for it. In Permissive, a bleaker, prog-rock-scored drama about London's groupie scene distributed by Tigon, both sisters were again billed only as "Groupie," in the same cast as a young Samantha Bond, who'd go on to play Miss Moneypenny in four James Bond films.
Their last role before Hammer came calling was She'll Follow You Anywhere (1971), released in America as Passion Potion, a British sex comedy about two chemists who accidentally invent an aftershave that works as a love potion. This time the twins got actual names, Janet and Martha, and one critic later noted the film was otherwise strangely light on nudity apart from one of the sisters briefly baring her top.
A horror film built around a magazine spread
Hammer was developing a project called Village of the Vampires, later retitled The Vampire Virgins, with Peter Cushing lined up to play villainous Count Karnstein opposite an unnamed village of women. Then producer Harry Fine saw the Collinsons' Playboy spread and had the whole project reworked around a real set of twins instead. Writer Tudor Gates stripped most of the original vampire Mircalla out of the story, added a puritanical witch hunter for Cushing to play, and the result became Twins of Evil, released in October 1971.
Casting them wasn't a given. Kate O'Mara had originally been considered for one of the twin roles, but the production couldn't find a look-alike double convincing enough to pass as her identical sister, so the search moved on to an actual set of twins instead.
Two accents, one dubbing booth
Neither sister spoke English without a heavy Maltese accent, so both had their dialogue dubbed by other actresses for the finished film. One modern rewatch of the film points out a detail that's easy to miss: the dub deliberately gives Frieda a foreign-accented voice and Maria one closer to Received Pronunciation, which was probably the simplest way to let an audience tell the good twin from the bad one without relying purely on lighting and camera tricks.
Filming alongside a grieving Peter Cushing
Twins of Evil turned out to be the third and final film in Hammer's so-called Karnstein trilogy, and Peter Cushing's last outing in it. It also became the Collinson sisters' final acting credit together. Shooting ran at Pinewood Studios and on location at Black Park between March and April 1971, only two months after Cushing's wife of nearly thirty years, Helen, had died. He'd lost a noticeable amount of weight and looked visibly gaunt on set, and biographer Wayne Kinsey later recorded that screenwriter Tudor Gates remembered Cushing holding conversations with his late wife inside his own dressing room between takes, a private way of coping that carried him through the shoot.
The film itself came out of the UK censor's office slightly thinner than it went in. The BBFC trimmed a scene of Gerta lying on Count Karnstein and cut footage of blood being smeared on a woman's body during the film's sacrifice scene, cuts made to the submitted print rather than the final theatrical release, and the removed footage is generally thought not to survive on any later video or DVD edition.
Cushing, Carson and a Jacqueline Susann bestseller
Their profile had already stretched across the Atlantic before any of that. According to the same Scotsman obituary, they appeared as guests on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show, and the pair also took roles in The Love Machine (1971), a Hollywood adaptation of Jacqueline Susann's bestselling novel about a ruthless television executive.
Wanted only as a pair, and only for one kind of role
The trouble, as Madeleine's own obituary in The Scotsman later put it bluntly, was that film producers only seemed interested in the Collinsons as a matched set, and only for roles where they had to take their clothes off. They disappeared from film work almost as quickly as they'd arrived, and Twins of Evil ended up being their last credit.
The film didn't disappear with them, though. It went on to pick up a cult reputation on video and DVD that it never had on its original release, and it's still the thing most horror fans know the Collinson name from today.
Two very different final chapters
Madeleine married a British Royal Air Force officer, raised three children under her married name, Dixon, and eventually moved back to Malta, where she got involved in local cultural and educational work. She died on 14 August 2014 at Mater Dei Hospital in Msida, after a nationwide power cut knocked out the ventilator system keeping her emphysema under control. Her twin sister Mary, who was present for her death, later told the Times of Malta she believed Madeleine could have survived if emergency services had reached her more quickly.
Mary's own path led somewhere quieter. According to The Playmate Book, Gretchen Edgren's history of every Playboy centrefold, Mary went on to have two daughters and settled in Milan, where she lived with an Italian partner for more than twenty years. She died there of bronchopneumonia on 23 November 2021, at the age of sixty-nine.
A pair of Playmates people still talk about
In one of the few surviving quotes attributed to either sister, Mary once summed up what it was actually like sharing a face and a career with her twin, "If I fall for a man, then so does Madeleine," according to IMDb.
Signed copies of that October 1970 issue and other memorabilia from their brief run of fame still circulate among collectors of vintage Playboy and Hammer horror material today, a small but steady afterlife for two sisters who never worked in film again after 1971. The pictorial and Twins of Evil remain the two things that keep the Collinson name in circulation, more than half a century on from a magazine spread nobody's quite managed to repeat since.
FAQ
Were Madeleine and Mary Collinson really identical twins? Yes. They were born identical twins in Sliema, Malta, on 22 July 1952, and their close resemblance was central to every part of their brief modelling and acting career.
Why were their voices dubbed in Twins of Evil? Both sisters spoke English with a strong Maltese accent, which Hammer's production team decided to replace with dubbed dialogue from other actresses, deliberately giving each twin a distinct voice so audiences could tell them apart.
Did the Collinson twins know their father? No. Their father was a British sailor who wasn't part of their upbringing, though the sisters later made contact with his family in Australia.
Is Twins of Evil their only film together? It was their final one, but not their only one. Before it, they'd appeared together in Come Back Peter, Permissive, Groupie Girl, She'll Follow You Anywhere and The Love Machine, all released between 1969 and 1971.
Further reading on the site
For more on the crossover between glamour modelling and Playboy history, our piece on Diane Webber, the Playboy Playmate who became a mermaid, a nudist and a belly dancing pioneer, covers a very different kind of Playmate afterlife. If it's the fame that identical twins specifically can generate that interests you, The Dolly Sisters, the Hungarian twins who gambled with kings and broke a millionaire, tells a Jazz Age version of the same story. And for another look at how Playboy itself made news beyond its centrefolds, the story of Salvador Dalí's takeover of a 1973 Playboy photoshoot is one of the stranger chapters in the magazine's history.
