The first time readers saw her, she was a young dancer posing for one of America’s most talked-about magazines.

The second time, even the man who ran the magazine reportedly failed to recognize her.

But her most surprising transformation came years later, when she stepped away from the camera and began leading performers of her own. By then, millions may have seen her image without knowing what she could do once the photographs were finished.

She was born in Los Angeles on July 29, 1932, into a family already familiar with performance and storytelling. Her mother had acted and won a beauty contest; her father was a writer and a veteran of the First World War.

Movement captured her imagination early. She studied ballet as a child and grew up in Hollywood, close to an entertainment industry that knew how to celebrate beautiful women but offered them fewer ways to define themselves.

As a young adult, she performed as a chorus girl in San Francisco and began working with photographers. Her dance training gave her an unusual command of posture and gesture. Even in a still image, she seemed to understand how the position of a hand or the turn of a shoulder could tell a story.

The camera noticed.

In May 1955, she appeared as Playboy’s Playmate of the Month under the name Marguerite Empey. The magazine was still young, and its monthly centerfold had not yet accumulated decades of famous faces.

For many models, that appearance would have been the defining moment. For her, it was only the first.

Nine months later, she returned as the February 1956 Playmate. This time, photographer and filmmaker Russ Meyer took the pictures. According to later accounts, publisher Hugh Hefner did not realize that he had featured the same woman the previous year.

Whether or not readers recognized her, the two appearances gave her a rare distinction in the magazine’s early history. The 1956 Playmate record documents both appearances and Meyer’s photography credit.

Her face did not remain confined to magazine pages. It appeared on record sleeves, including albums by Nelson Riddle and Les Baxter—a fitting place for a performer whose deepest connection to art was through music and movement.

She also took screen roles. Her work included appearances in Mermaids of Tiburon and The Witchmaker, films far removed from the polished image of a 1950s centerfold. Yet photography and acting still left one part of her talent underused.

She wanted to dance.

By the late 1960s, she was teaching Middle Eastern dance in California. She went on to found a troupe called Perfumes of Araby, turning her experience as a solo performer into a way of bringing other dancers before an audience.

The change was more than a new job. In a photograph, she could control her own pose. As a teacher and troupe leader, she could shape an entire performance: the movement, the setting and the confidence of the women joining her onstage.

Her dancers performed at Renaissance fairs and other public events. Some audiences had never heard of the woman’s earlier modeling career. They knew her instead as the person who taught, organized and gave the group its direction.

One former dancer later described her as the troupe’s “founding mother.” When the founder scaled back her involvement, the company continued under new leadership—a sign that what she had built could endure beyond her own performances. A former member recounts the troupe’s beginnings and her role in it.

For readers who remember only the centerfolds, this is the part of the story most easily missed.

The same woman had been a ballet student, chorus girl, model, actress, dance teacher and company founder. Each chapter drew on something from the one before it. The stillness of modeling had grown out of movement; the authority of teaching had grown out of years spent performing.

She did not have to erase the photographs to become more than them.

In her later years, she worked as a librarian and archivist for a law firm. It was another role unlikely to appear beside a vintage glamour portrait, but no less real for that.

She died in Los Angeles on August 19, 2008, at 76. The images from the 1950s survived, as photographs do. So did the memories of dancers who had learned from her and carried her work forward.

Two centerfolds made her recognizable. The lives she touched after them made the picture far more interesting.

The performer who appeared twice under the name Marguerite Empey and later founded Perfumes of Araby was Diane Webber.