Victoria Vetri Trivia - Victoria Vetri Information and Facts
Daniel Cobb
Using the name Angela Dorian, she was chosen as Playboy's Playmate of the Month for the September 1967 issue and subsequently was the 1968 Playmate of the Year. Her centerfold was photographed by Carl Gunther. Vetri won $20,000 in prizes when she was selected Playmate of the Year. Among these were a new car (an all pink AMC AMX), gold watch, skis and a ski outfit, a complete wardrobe, a movie camera, a typewriter, a tape recorder, a stereo, and a guitar. Her centerfold photo (along with Leslie Bianchini, Reagan Wilson and Cynthia Myers) was scanned and inserted into Apollo 12 Extra-vehicular activity astronaut cuff checklists by pranksters at NASA.(1)(2)
She appears briefly in Rosemary's Baby, credited as "Angela Dorian". In one scene Rosemary remarks that she resembles the actress Victoria Vetri. In January 1969, she signed a multi-picture contract with Warner Seven Arts. Vetri was given a starring role in When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth. She refused to have her hair turned blonde from its natural auburn for the film. The story required a blonde so Vetri demanded a wig instead. Columnist Hy Gardner nominated Vetri as a new sex symbol on the Hollywood horizon in March 1971.
Vetri posed topless for the April 1984 Playboy pictorial Playmates Forever! Part Two. In Tom Clancy's 2004 biography of Gen. Tony Zinni, USMC (Ret.), Battle Ready (Chapter 2), Zinni remarks on having received a copy of the September 1967 Playboy Centerfold foldout from a group of other advisers for his birthday. He still has it as a memento of his time in Vietnam.
The heroine of Da Vinci Code prequel Angels & Demons, published in 2000, is called Vittoria Vetra. A scientist working at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Geneva, Switzerland, the character's name and physical description are both based on Victoria Vetri's. Author Dan Brown has acknowledged in various interviews that he is a long-time admirer of the actress and intentionally modelled Angels & Demons' Italian physicist and marine biologist on Vetri. Vittoria Vetra was played by Ayelet Zurer in the film adaptation of the novel directed by Ron Howard.
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Angela Dorian or wait isn't that Victoria Vitri? Well both answers would be correct. She was born Victoria Vetri and was the daughter of Italian-born parents: her father was a restaurateur from Sicily and her mother a singer from Rome. She studied art at Los Angeles City College and began her movie career in 1963 with a role in "Kings of the Sun," an epic about a Mayan tribe's emigration from Mexico to Texas. Richard Basehart, Yul Brynner and George Chakiris starred in the film, and Victoria played a Mayan girl named Ixzubin.
Although she already had a budding acting career under her own name, Victoria Vetri, her agent suggested she assume the nom-de-Playmate "Angela Dorian" when she posed for Playboy. Allegedly, he was inspired by the headlines surrounding the shipwreck of the Italian ocean liner Andrea Dorian nearly a dozen years previously. After Batman in 1968 she went on to appear in Rosemary's Baby (1968), When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970), Group Marriage (1972) and the last credit I can find on her was in Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973) as Julie Zorn .
Playboy Playmate of the Month September 1967 (as Angela Dorian)
Playboy Playmate of the Year 1968 (as Angela Dorian)
Loves fast cars and car racing, and in her time has owned a Porsche, a Sprite, and a pink AMX that she won for being "Playmate of the Year" in 1968.
Has a son named Bret who was born in 1964.
During one of the Playboy photo sessions, she was reclining in a hammock for one of the pictures that gave way. She suffered two broken ribs.
Was the victim of a brutal attack in her house in Hollywood in 1980, suffering a broken nose and broken ribs. The perpetrators were never caught.
Turned down a role that could have made her star...that of the nubile title role in Lolita (1962), which made a sensation out of Sue Lyon.
She auditioned unsuccessfully for a role in the film version of West Side Story (1961).
Played a bejeweled "Florence of Arabia" to Victor Buono's "King Tut" in the "Batman" (1966) episode, "Batman: I'll Be a Mummy's Uncle (#3.23)" (1968).
Victoria Vetri was charged with attempted murder, after she allegedly shot her husband of 25 years, Bruce Rathgeb, from close range in their Hollywood apartment on Saturday, 16 October 2010. On 7 September 2011, after pleading no contest to charges of attempted voluntary manslaughter, she was sentenced to 9 years in prison.