Ulla's historic photoToday, November 17th, is the 40th anniversary of The Sun's first Page 3 girl. Swedish model Ulla Lindstrom posed rather decorously in a white shirt (it would be another year before Stephanie Rahn posed as the first topless Page 3 girl)
"She's just the sort of gorgeous blonde you hope will smile at you on a dull, back-to-work Monday morning," said The Sun "This Swedish charmer has a nice line in brains, too. At present she's studying to become a systems analyst for computers in Stockholm."
"She's just the sort of gorgeous blonde you hope will smile at you on a dull, back-to-work Monday morning," said The Sun "This Swedish charmer has a nice line in brains, too. At present she's studying to become a systems analyst for computers in Stockholm."
Well, possibly. Ulla was, in fact, a well known continental model even before she appeared in The Sun.
A few months earlier, in September, she had been the Penthouse Pet of the Month in the UK and in November the same pictorial appeared as Pet of the Month in the new US edition of Penthouse.
Splendour in the grass
Ulla sported two distinct hairstyles in her Penthouse pictorial but it was the shorter one which featured in The Sun.
Would you like to play a round?
Ulla in a European magazine...
..and displaying her pert posterior in a pre-pubic Penthouse.Ulla's Penthouse shots were taken by London-based Israeli photographer, Amnon Bar-Tur. He shot a lot of the early UK Penthouse material which was subsequently used in the US magazine. He went on to be a regular photographer for Paul Raymond's Men Only and Club International magzines in the seventies.
Amnon Bar-Tur todayMoving to the US, Bar-Tur founded a graphic and digital imaging firm called Chroma Copy, now C2 Media -a firm with a large number of Fortune 500 clients. Recently he has been trying to set up a Biblical theme park in the US and his Penthouse past has come back to haunt him.
One of Penthouse's finest shots of the sixties
A sixteen year old Ulla flashes her nipple on the cover of a Scandinavian magazine in a way that even Penthouse couldn't do three years later.
More sixties bean bag posing for Penthouse
Ulla demonstrates her net worth Looking on the internet there is a lot of nonsense talked about who the first Page 3 girl was; Jilly Johnson claims it was her but it was undoubtedly the gorgeous Ulla, so beautifully captured by Mr Bar-Tur for Penthouse just before her starring role in the Sun.
Page 3 has not really contributed very much towards the photography of the female nude (unlike Penthouse, for example) but in making it a common sight on the British breakfast table, it has helped, we would argue, engender a healthy attitude to nakedness which contrasts with the rather puritannical views still held in some other Anglo-Saxon countries and has brought us closer to Northern European attitudes. Certainly, if you visit the Mediterranean beaches of Europe you will probably find that all those topless girls are from Brighton, Birmingham and (inevitably) Bristol rather than Barcelona, Berne or Brussels. The Sun has, in no small way, contributed to this relaxed attitude and all credit to Mr Larry Lamb and his 1960s circulation war.
