Obituaries

Ellen Frances Brooks O'NeillActress, Businesswoman

Ellen Frances Brooks O'Neill, 58, a former teenage model who went on to a varied career as a Playboy bunny, actress, artist, university instructor and businesswoman, died Dec. 27 at University of North Carolina Health Care in Chapel Hill, N.C. She had brain cancer.

Mrs. O'Neill was born in Chicago and lived in Key West, Fla., before moving to Washington at age 8. She attended National Cathedral School before graduating from Northampton School for Girls in Northampton, Mass.

A precocious artist and performer, Mrs. O'Neill studied ballet in Key West and Miami with Princess Nina Carrociola, a former prima ballerina in the Diaghilev Ballet company. She also studied painting -- landscapes and portraits were her specialty -- as a child in Key West and at the Corcoran School of Art.

Mrs. O'Neill danced and performed in local theatrical productions in Washington and modeled for Garfinckel's department store and Pepco as a teenager. In a 1964 ad for self-cleaning ovens, she is shown with a head full of rollers.

Immediately after high school, she toured South America with the June Taylor Dancers. She later toured the United States with Ann Corio, the burlesque queen, in "This Was Burlesque," which was also performed at the Shady Grove Theater. When the tour reached California, Mrs. O'Neill joined the Repertory Theatre at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She also started a wedding dress boutique, specializing in gowns imported from Mexico, in Mill Valley, Calif.

After moving to New York in her early twenties, she directed and acted in six horror films that played mostly in Southern drive-ins. She also worked in several advertising and marketing firms before joining American Express as an advertising account executive.

From 1977 to 2003, she lived in Malvern, Pa., where she owned an advertising consulting business, and taught advertising and marketing at Temple University.

A graduate of Temple University in Philadelphia, she received a master's degree from the University of Wisconsin in journalism and mass communications in 1999. She began studies for a doctorate in journalism and mass communication in 2000 at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, where she moved in 2005.

A photograph of Mrs. O'Neill, taken when she was a model and Playboy bunny in the 1960s, is included in the 2003 book "Bikini Girls of the 1960s" by Bunny Yeager.

Her marriage to William Shibe ended in divorce.

In December 2003, on the day her cancer was diagnosed as terminal, the man she had been dating for 18 months proposed to her. They were married April 1, 2004.

Survivors include her husband, retired Army Col. Timothy O'Neill of Alexandria and Chapel Hill; her mother, Janet Brooks of Washington; and a brother, Roger Stratten Brooks of Rotkreuz, Switzerland.