Stratten was murdered shortly after co-starring in the movie They All Laughed, at the age of 20, by her estranged husband and manager Paul Snider, whom she was in the process of divorcing and breaking business ties with.

[citation needed] Dorothy Stratten was born in Grace Maternity Hospital in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, on February 28, 1960, to Simon and Nelly Hoogstraten, who had emigrated from the Netherlands.

"[4] Concurrently, she was working part-time at a local Dairy Queen, where she met 26-year-old Vancouver-area club promoter and pimp Paul Snider, who began dating her.

On March 22, 1980, Stratten flew to New York City to begin work on what became her last film project, They All Laughed (1981), a romantic comedy being directed by Peter Bogdanovich.

[5] This would be Stratten's fifth movie in a career that had only begun the year before and represented her first substantial role in a big-budget picture, playing the unhappily-married love interest of John Ritter, one of the film's stars.

However, Snider's near-constant presence, as well as his criticism of and almost daily arguments with his wife, caused Stratten so much stress that her co-workers at Playboy and the Galaxina set took notice of the tension in the relationship.

As the spring of 1980 approached, Snider insisted on accompanying his wife to New York for the shoot for They All Laughed, but Stratten recognized the problems he could cause on set and wanted the freedom to pursue her relationship with Bogdanovich.

After taking the lectern, Stratten thanked Mario Casilli, the photographer who shot both her Playmate of the Month and Year pictorials, several Playboy executives, and finally Hefner, whom she declared "has made me probably the happiest girl in the world today.

At some point during the fight, Stratten offered to give up her acting career and suggested the couple permanently return to Canada; however, Snider rebuffed his wife's attempt to save their marriage.

[11] As a foreign national living in the U.S. without a green card that would allow him to hold a job and having no other source of regular income, Snider relied on Stratten, now through her business manager, to pay the monthly household bills.

Therefore, over the summer of 1980, Snider began selling Stratten's Playmate of the Year prizes at a loss for quick cash, the most notable example being a Jaguar sportscar that Playboy had valued at $26,000.

Stratten's official Los Angeles residence was now at the address of a newly rented Beverly Hills apartment, but in actuality she had quietly moved into Bogdanovich's mansion in Bel Air.

[3] On the night of July 31, 1980, Snider, by now aware that his estranged wife was back in Los Angeles and living with Bogdanovich, hid among the shadows just outside the director's estate carrying a borrowed handgun, intending to shoot anyone who appeared at the entrance to the property.

After several hours of inactivity, Snider grew impatient and left, drove up into the hills overlooking the city and, he admitted later to a friend, had thoughts of suicide.

[17] On August 13, 1980 – the second anniversary of Stratten's first arrival in Los Angeles[18] – Snider bought a used 12-gauge, pump-action shotgun from a private seller he found in a local classified ad.

[19][17] Snider made several morbid remarks to his companions related to the problems at Playboy magazine caused by Jennings' death, including a comment about how the editors would pull nude photos of a dead Playmate from the next issue if there was time.

[3][20] She had spent the morning conferring with her business manager, and one of the topics the pair discussed was the amount of the property settlement Stratten would offer her estranged husband that afternoon.

[3] Towards the end of her morning meeting, Stratten's business manager made an observation: that his young client could avoid spending any more time with Snider by handing off the remaining separation and divorce negotiations to her lawyer.

[30] Three years after the murder, the author's granddaughter, Mariel Hemingway, played Stratten in Star 80, the Bob Fosse biopic about the doomed Playmate and her husband.

[32][33] Upset that what would be his only project with Stratten did not have a nationwide release, and determined that her last screen performance have a chance to be seen by a broader audience, Bogdanovich bought the theatrical rights to the picture.

Despite generally favorable reviews and strong attendance in some theaters, Bogdanovich ultimately sank more than five million dollars, his entire net worth at the time, into the project to properly promote and distribute the movie and rescue Stratten's film legacy.

One Day Since Yesterday, a documentary about the making and cultural importance of Bogdanovich's romantic comedy, which includes interviews with the director and his remembrances of Stratten, premiered in 2014.

[41] While few objected to Bogdanovich's attacks on Hefner and Playboy, many were skeptical of his newfound feminism, pointing out, for example, that he "seemed oblivious to his own sexist susceptibility to 'the whore/Madonna complex' in his view of women.

In an article that appeared shortly after the murder, Hefner, who was 33 years older than Stratten, used the word "friendship" to describe his relationship with her and was said to see himself as a "father figure" to the Playmate.

[3] The image that Hefner presented to the public as a supportive, benevolent, paternal figure to Stratten was emphasized the following spring when Playboy published her biography in its May 1981 issue.

Namely, Hefner admitted that several weeks after Stratten first arrived in Los Angeles, the two had taken a nude soak in the Jacuzzi on the Playboy Mansion grounds, the place where Bogdanovich claimed the sexual assault had occurred.

Hefner also denied, despite his reputation, that he had ever so much as made a pass at the young Canadian, suggesting that his sexual interest in Stratten had ended in the Jacuzzi after learning that she expected to become engaged to her boyfriend.

In 1983, film critic Vincent Canby wrote "Miss Stratten possessed a charming screen presence and might possibly have become a first-rate comedienne with time and work".