Playmate of the Month for February 1971, the flame-haired Dutch-Canadian model Willy Rey (nÊe Wilhelmina Rietveld) was born in the Netherlands in August 1949 and emigrated to Canada whilst still a child. Characterised in contemporaneous accounts as ‘vivacious’, ‘sweet and innocent’, and ‘totally honest’, the young lady briefly achieved her long-cherished aspiration of modelling fame in the early 1970s, appearing in the pages of Playboy and across a range of print advertisements, including extensive work in Japan. By August of 1973, however, something had gone terribly awry, and Willy Rey succumbed to a fatal overdose of sleeping medication at her family's residence near Vancouver, a mere twenty-four years of age.
In an obituary published by the Canadian Press, her father was quoted as saying: “I wish there had never been a Playboy. She would not have become famous and I would still have my daughter.” In the months preceding her passing, she had, by various accounts, consulted ‘several’ psychiatrists, and was said to have ‘experimented with hard drugs’ and become ‘deep into God-Devil worship’ (the precise nature of which is anybody’s guess). I pray her father and loved ones found some measure of consolation in the years following her death. Whatever ultimately led to Willy Rey's tragic demise — and whilst deeper information about life and background proved elusive in my research — her beauty and her name endure through the body of work she left behind; and she merits remembrance as considerably more than merely the circumstances attending her final days.
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Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.
