Lynda Wiesmeier: cause of death, and the years after

Lynda Wiesmeier died of a brain tumour on 16 December 2012, in Ramona, California. She was 49.

She had made twelve films, almost all of them inside five years, and then she stopped. She was 24. Nobody has ever written down what she did with the quarter-century that followed.

Updated October 2026

How did Lynda Wiesmeier die?

A brain tumour, on 16 December 2012, in Ramona, California. She was 49 years old.

Who was Lynda Wiesmeier?

She was born on 30 May 1963 in Washington, D.C.

In July 1982, at 19, she was both the cover model and the Playmate of the Month for Playboy — the centrefold shot by Richard Fegley. Being given both in the same issue is unusual, and it opened every door she walked through afterwards.

She then worked steadily for the magazine for more than five years: as a model, in promotional work, and as a reporter for the Playboy Channel.

What films was Lynda Wiesmeier in?

Twelve, and eleven of them arrived between 1983 and 1987.

American Pop came first, in 1981, before the Playboy issue. Then the run: Joysticks and Private School in 1983, Preppies and R.S.V.P. in 1984, and then five in a single year — Malibu Express, Avenging Angel, Wheels of Fire, Real Genius and Teen Wolf, all released in 1985. Touch and Go followed in 1986, and Evil Town in 1987.

Two of those 1985 films never went away. Real Genius and Teen Wolf still turn up on television most years, and most of the people watching have no idea she is in them.

Evil Town is usually called her final film, but that is an artefact of release dates rather than a career decision — it was assembled from footage shot across several earlier years and then shelved.

Why did Lynda Wiesmeier stop acting?

Nobody knows. And that is worth saying plainly instead of filling in.

Her last release came in 1987, when she was 24. She lived another twenty-five years and never appeared on screen again. No interview, no obituary and no profile has ever explained the decision — or established that there was a decision at all, rather than simply no more offers.

Most of what circulates online about her later life traces back to a single personal blog post, written three years after she died. It may well be accurate. It is also the only source, and there is no way to check it.

What is Lynda Wiesmeier remembered for?

It depends entirely on who you ask, which is the strange thing about a career shaped like hers.

To Playboy readers, the July 1982 issue. To anyone who grew up on 1980s cable, a run of films that were never built to last and somehow did anyway. And to the few people who have gone looking since she died, a gap where a biography ought to be.