Twiggy review - portrait of a supermodel who branched out

When Twiggy burst on to the scene in 1966, she was a beacon of hope for all flat-chested, short-haired, skinny girls. Of course we couldn’t look as fabulous as she did, with her enormous eyes and high forehead and long legs, but we could try.

Before Twiggy, models were posh. They went to the Lucie Clayton Charm Academy in Bond Street and learned how to curtsey, pivot round an umbrella and get out of a car gracefully. In director Sadie Frost’s lively, likeable film, featuring many celeb talking heads including Paul McCartney and Dustin Hoffman, an alumnus, namely Joanna Lumley, looks back. “A lot of us looked very much like each other,” she sighs.

Twiggy didn’t look like anyone else. Born in Neasden in 1949, Lesley Hornby was the youngest of three girls. “We were working-class, definitely.” Her mother was what would now be diagnosed as bipolar and had to “go away for a couple of weeks” every now and then, but it was a happy home, and Frost has unearthed great archive footage and family snaps.

Before she was a model, she was a mod, allowed out one night a week to a club in Harrow. After the mod phase came Biba, where Barbara Hulanicki remembers her standing silently, looking like Greta Garbo, with her wonderful eye-makeup: three pairs of eyelashes, the ones underneath painted on. She got the idea from her rag doll.

Everything changed when Twiggy was 15. She had a Saturday job at a hairdresser and met Justin de Villeneuve there. He was 25. “It wasn’t very politically correct.” Justin knew she wanted to be a model and introduced her to a friend who worked on a magazine. One of the “editrices” – Twiggy’s word - there said, ‘You’ll never make a model, you’re too small and too slim.’” But she thought her face had potential, told her to get some test shots and sent her to Leonard of Mayfair to have her hair cut. She was in there for seven hours.

Barry Latergan, “such a sweet man”, took the first photos of the revolutionary boyish haircut and Leonard hung a print in his salon, which was noticed by Deirdre McSharry, fashion editor of the Daily Express. In a few weeks, Cockney kid Twiggy – the snappy name came from being called Sticks, then Twiggy, because of her skinny legs - was the face of 1966. “This kind of thing didn’t happen to people like us.” She decided, with her parents’ blessing, to leave school. By now she was 16.

“A gender-fluid little elfin face,” says Joanna Lumley. “It was just what the fashion world was waiting for.” A photograph of Twiggy on her bike, says Rankin, embodied freedom and sexual liberation. “She changed the face of fashion,” says fashion editor and author Suzy Menkes, because “she smiled. She smiled a lot.”

Justin, by now her boyfriend, was also her manager, encouraged by her father who was worried about his daughter entering this strange new world. Justin went with her to shoots, much to some eminent photographers’ dismay – four, including David Bailey, refused to work with her - and to America in 1967, where she cowered, terrified, in a limo after Twiggy-mask-wearing crowds converged on her. She was on the cover and much of the inside of American Vogue. Diana Vreeland pronounced her “delicious”. Sonny and Cher threw a party for them on their lawn.

Justin protected her but he spent a lot – of her earnings, presumably - on Savile Row suits (she was still buying Biba dresses) and cars and spoke for her in interviews. He proved a liability later on too, after Twiggy left the modelling world behind and met Ken Russell, who championed her to star in The Boy Friend in 1971 (he says she was “perfection. Simple, honest, with a mind of her own. A rejuvenating force”). Justin had his own ideas about film-making. Russell banned him from the set, which came as a relief, admits Twiggy.

Her modelling career was, through her own choice, relatively short and inevitably it’s not as thrilling to see her, as time goes on, looking more conventionally pretty, with long hair and less exciting eye make-up. But it has to be said that her versatility and natural talent, with no formal training in acting, singing and dancing, are extraordinary.

She won two Golden Globes for The Boy Friend, starred in a TV adaptation of Pygmalion, made a few Hollywood films including W – “it wasn’t a very good film but I loved doing it” – where she met her first husband, co-star Michael Witney, the father of her daughter Carly. He was an alcoholic and died in 1983 (she’s been happily married to Leigh Lawson since 1988).

She starred opposite Robin Williams in Club Paradise, made several albums – she sang live on TV with Bing Crosby – and was nominated for a Tony award for the Broadway musical My One and Only. It may get a trifle wearying to hear everyone, from Dustin Hoffman to Lulu to Robert Powell to Sienna Miller, go on about how open and lacking in artifice she is, but nevertheless an impressive portrait emerges of a straightforward woman who loves to work (most recently as the face of M&S). And the last clip of her dancing, in a stripy sequined mini-dress and silver shoes, aged about 17, is unforgettable. If you were once a skinny Sixties girl, you might even shed a tear.

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