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English model and pornographic actress

Mary Ruth Maxted (née Quilter; 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 magazine publisher David Sullivan, who promoted her widely as a model and featured her in the 1977 softcore comedy Come Play With Me, which ran for a record breaking four years at the same cinema. In her later years, she faced depression and pressure from frequent police raids on her sex shop. After a downward spiral of drug addiction, shoplifting and debt, she died at home of an overdose of medicine and vodka, aged 33. Millington has been described as one of the "two hottest British sex film stars of the seventies", the other being Fiona Richmond.

Mary Ruth Quilter was born out of wedlock on 30 November 1945, and brought up by her single mother, Joan Quilter (19 February 1914 – 17 May 1976), initially in Willesden and later in Mid Holmwood near Dorking. Growing up without her father, John William G. Klein (1899–1973), Mary was bullied at school owing to being illegitimate, and she suffered from low self esteem throughout her childhood and teenage years. She left school at age 15 in 1961, and, at age 18 in 1964, she married Robert Maxted and lived in Dorking. She had to nurse her terminally ill mother for more than ten years, and she began her pornography career to pay for her mother's care. She had wanted to be a fashion model, but, at only 4 feet 11 inches, she was not tall enough. Instead, she became a glamour model in the late 1960s.

Soon after starting work as 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 and began appearing in 8mm hardcore pornographic film loops which sold well in Europe. One of her first films was Miss Bohrloch in 1970. Miss Bohrloch won the Golden Phallus Award at the Wet Dream Festival held in November 1970 in Amsterdam. She starred in around twenty short hardcore films for John Lindsay, 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. 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). Sex is My Business was shot late on a Saturday night at a sex shop on London's Coventry Street. The storyline concerned a powerful aphrodisiac being dropped by a customer, the potency of which renders the shop's staff and customers sex crazy. Maxted, dressed in a short see through dress, is the film's main focus of attention, playing a member of staff who drags a customer into the back room for some multi position sex, thoughtfully turning on the shop's CCTV camera so others can watch. Sex is My Business was considered something of a lost film until a Super 8 print was located and privately transferred to DVD in 2008. The film subsequently made its internet debut on 26 July 2008 at the (now defunct) site ZDD Visual Explosion. In 2010, Sex is My Business was included as a special feature on the DVD re release of Come Play With Me. In February 1974, Maureen O’Malley, her co star in Sex is My Business, introduced her to adult magazine publisher David Sullivan. Although she was still married, the pair became lovers. Quilter had used many different stage names and aliases during her pornography career until 1974, when Sullivan rebranded her as Mary Millington. 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". The filming of Millington's last film appearance took place in early to mid 1978. She played Mary in the Sex Pistols film The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, directed by Julien Temple, which was released theatrically in March 1980. However, neither she nor her punk rock co star Sid Vicious lived to see the completion of the film. Liz Fraser, one of her co stars in the film, remembered: "I was next to this girl called Mary Millington, and she and I had a great chat together and then we went into the pub for a lunch, during the filming of that, and someone said 'she’s a porn star', and I said 'I don’t understand what do you mean' and he said 'porn, p o r n' and he said 'she’s naked and she does everything in all these films', but she was lovely and so I met my first porn star". In 1978, she was approached to appear in a hardcore porn film called Love is Beautiful, to have been directed by Gerard Damiano. However, despite Millington and Damiano being pictured together at that year's Cannes Film Festival, the film (meant to have been produced by David Grant's Oppidan Films) never materialized. Potential co stars may have included Harry Reems, Gloria Brittain and Lisa Taylor. That same year she turned 33 and found herself being replaced by younger models in Sullivan's magazines.

Millington had suffered from neurosis and depression, which were exacerbated by her cocaine habit. Her mother's death at age 62 on 17 May 1976, after over 10 years with cancer, also affected her deeply, and her behaviour became unpredictable, which led to her breaking up with Sullivan. In March 1978, she ceased to work in Sullivan's Whitehouse sex shop in Norbury and opened her own in Tooting, also in South London, called Mary Millington's International Sex Centre. She began to spend more time working in her own shop, selling illegal material. The shop was raided by the police on numerous occasions, and she claimed the police threatened her and forced her to pay protection money. In the past, she had publicly criticised police raids on sex shops and published the addresses and telephone numbers of Scotland Yard, the Director of Public Prosecutions and Members of Parliament in her magazines. Her life began a downward spiral into drug use and depression following the raids on her shop. A few months prior to her death, she had received a large tax bill which she was unable to pay. Her kleptomania became more pronounced in the last year of her life, with arrests for shoplifting in June 1979 and again for stealing a necklace the day before her death. Millington died by suicide at age 33, by an overdose of tricyclic antidepressant anafranil, paracetamol and alcohol at her home in Walton on the Hill, Surrey. Her husband found her dead in her bed on 19 August 1979. She left four suicide notes which were found near her body. In one of them, she had written: "The police have framed me yet again. They frighten me so much. I can't face the thought of prison The Nazi tax man has finished me as well." In another note, to her solicitor Michael Kaye (partly published in Private magazine no 59), Millington wrote "the police have killed me with their threats the police have made my life a misery with frame ups. The tax man has hounded me so much – I will be made bankrupt, he mustn't get anything of his £200,000 demands. He is a religious maniac." 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". Millington was a member of the National Campaign for the Reform of the Obscene Publications Acts (NCROPA) and encouraged her readers to demand the abolition of the Acts. 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." Millington was buried at St Mary Magdalene Church, in South Holmwood, Surrey, marked by a grey granite tombstone which bears her married name. She is buried in the same grave as her mother, Joan Quilter, who died in 1976. In 1996, Channel Four screened a tribute to her entitled Sex and Fame: The Mary Millington Story, featuring an interview with David Sullivan. 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. In 2004, Millington's prominence was recognized by her inclusion in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by Colin Matthew and Brian Harrison. Her entry was written by Richard Davenport Hines. 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. In late 2009, an 8 mm copy of one of her early John Lindsay short films Special Assignment resurfaced. Unseen since the early 1970s, it was subsequently transferred to DVD. Two years later in 2011, Wild Lovers, another 8 mm film starring Millington, was also traced and transferred from 8 mm to DVD. In 2014, four spoken word erotic stories recorded by Millington in 1978–9 were released as a vinyl LP. A nightclub in Liverpool is named after her. Nevertheless, Come Play With Me stands as one of the longest running films in British movie history. Millington self identified as bisexual and said that she preferred lesbian sex.

A feature length documentary chronicling Millington's life, entitled Respectable – The Mary Millington Story, was partly shot and produced at Pinewood Studios in 2015. 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. The film received its world premiere at London's Regent Street Cinema in April 2016. A DVD of the film was released in the UK on 2 May 2016.