Robert E McGinnis, an illustrator whose lusty, photorealistic artwork of curvaceous women adorned more than 1,200 pulp paperbacks, as well as classic movie posters for Breakfast at Tiffany’s featuring Audrey Hepburn with a cigarette holder, and James Bond adventures including Thunderball, died on March 10th at his home in Greenwich, Connecticut. He was 99.
His family confirmed the death.
McGinnis’ female figures from the 1960s and 1970s flaunted a bold sexuality, often in a state of semiundress, whether on the covers of detective novels by John D MacDonald or on posters for movies such as Barbarella (1968), with a bikini-clad Jane Fonda, or Bond films starring Sean Connery and Roger Moore.
Beginning in 1958, he painted book covers for espionage, crime, Western, fantasy and other genre series — generally cheap paperbacks meant to grab a male reader’s eye in a drugstore, only to be quickly read and discarded.
He was best known for illustrating detective series featuring gumshoes Mike Shayne, Perry Mason and various shamuses in works by prolific author Carter Brown. The femme fatales who adorned those covers became known collectively as “The McGinnis Woman”.
The McGinnis Woman was long-legged, impossibly beautiful and sophisticated looking. Her curves were the pneumatic ideal of Playboy and Barbie, but her allure was never that of Hugh Hefner’s prized girl next door. She was a man-eater, sometimes topless, and was usually placed in the foreground while bumping the male character, the book’s protagonist, into a secondary role.
To pose for his paintings, McGinnis hired svelte models, including a young Shere Hite, who went on to write the wide-selling The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality in 1976.
Playboy once approached McGinnis to fill the shoes of its illustrator Alberto Vargas, who drew the magazine’s signature “Vargas Girl” nudes, but McGinnis wasn’t interested. “I didn’t like what was going on there, with the bunny tails and the ridiculous way they treated women,” he told Vanity Fair in 2017.
In 1961, he began getting offers from the publicity departments of movie studios, in an era when a film’s poster was a narrative artwork used to entice viewers into a theatre, not a Photoshopped afterthought.
McGinnis is probably best known for the poster for Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), for which he painted Hepburn in a snug black dress, a cat draped around her shoulders.
For numerous Bond movies, he painted scenes that burst with action and cemented in the public imagination the idea that the 007 movies featured not just a swank secret agent but also a series of Bond girls with dangerous curves who were his foils.
“If you wanted beautiful women in Bond posters, there was only one man: Bob McGinnis,” Don Smolen, who commissioned the posters for United Artists, told director Paul Jilbert for a 2008 documentary about the illustrator.
Besides Thunderball (1965), McGinnis also did the posters (sometimes in collaboration with another artist) for the Bond films You Only Live Twice (1967), On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), Diamonds Are Forever (1971), Live and Let Die (1973) and The Man With the Golden Gun (1974).
His other movie poster work included The Odd Couple (1968) and Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), a psychedelic swirl that incorporated scantily clad women, a gold Rolls-Royce and men pointing guns, a familiar trope from the Blaxploitation genre.
Robert Edwards McGinnis was born in 1926 in Cincinnati and raised in Wyoming, Ohio. He was the second of six children. His father, Nolan, was a construction worker who encouraged his son’s talent for drawing. His mother, Mildred (Finch) McGinnis, enrolled him in drawing classes at the Cincinnati Art Museum.
A high school art teacher landed him an apprenticeship at the Walt Disney Studios in California, where he worked as a teenager until the second World War paused the studios’ cartoon output.
McGinnis enrolled at Ohio State University, where he played left tackle for the football team, which went undefeated in 1944.
Although he left before graduating, he met Ferne Mitchell there, and they married in 1948. The couple moved east, and McGinnis found work in advertising illustration.
In 1958, when an agent showed McGinnis’ work to an art director at Dell, the book publisher, he was hired to paint covers for four paperbacks, at $200 each.
He was soon in constant demand from publishers, earning much better rates.
“My illustration work went through the roof,” McGinnis told Vanity Fair. “I raised three kids on it. A lot of illustrators wouldn’t do them — they were considered cheap and low grade. But I enjoyed doing them. I didn’t see anything demeaning about it.”
His wife of 75 years died in 2023. McGinnis is survived by their three children, Melinda Reynolds, Laurie McGinnis and Kyle McGinnis; three grandchildren; and a brother, David McGinnis.
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