Dorian Leigh

Jul 11 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

IT IS perhaps surprising that the willowy beauty, adored by photographers, lipstick advertisers and movie-makers, who cruised through five husbands in a career which makes today’s supermodel, Kate Moss, seem like a girl guide, should have studied calculus at university.

In a rare moment of under-statement, Cecil Beaton, the be-hatted photographer, noted that she possessed “the sweetness of an 18th-century pastel, the allure of a Sargent portrait, or the poignancy of some unfortunate woman who sat for Modigliani”.

He was speaking of Dorian Leigh, the world’s first supermodel, who had the gift of living in a photograph in the same way as Marilyn Monroe or, more particularly, Audrey Hepburn.

Indeed, it was said that she had many similarities to the Hepburn character in Funny Face (1956) and Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961).

In fact, Truman Capote, writer of Tiffany’s, on occasion offered his arm to Miss Leigh.

But it was as the world’s first great photographic model that she established a reputation which would at its height enable her to earn a dollar a minute for posing.

Her most famous commission was in the 1950s, when she was the girl in the Revlon advertisements for Fire and Ice lipstick and nail polish. “For you who love to flirt with fire . . . who dare to skate on thin ice,” was the slogan.