There were other groovy Brit models in the 1960s, (Jean Shrimpton, Pattie Boyd, Penelope Tree, etc.) but Twiggy’s gamine figure; large, expressive eyes; and pixie haircut made her the era’s most famous face. Twiggy: The Woman Behind the Icon, Sadie Frost’s brisk, upbeat documentary about Dame Lesley Lawson, DBE, the former cultural megastar of the 1960s, reveals the woman behind the image.
Sixteen-year-old Lesley Hornby lived with her parents and two sisters in Northwest London. Through a series of fortuitous introductions – and an ultra-short haircut at a hip salon – she rose from her working-class background almost overnight to become Twiggy, “The Face of ‘66”. (Her show-biz name was a derivative of her childhood nickname “Twigs.”) Her first boyfriend, Nigel Davis, became her manager, and changed his name to Justin de Villeneuve. He didn’t seem controlling at first from the information presented here, just extraneous and a bit of an opportunist, but toward the end of their relationship, when he’d accompany her on talk shows, it became evident that he’d outworn his usefulness.
While today’s media touts Warhol protege Edie Sedgewick as the “youthquaker” of the ‘60s,it was Twiggy who captured the public’s imagination, initially in England and then all over the world. I remember receiving a Twiggy Barbie doll – in her yellow, green, and blue striped miniskirt – for Christmas as a seven-year-old in 1967. The Twiggy “industry” spawned all sorts of products, including a fashion line which she helped design.
Twiggy’s whirlwind fame didn’t seem to faze her. In modeling clips of her at the height of her fame, she’s usually smiling or laughing and completely in the moment. “She had a laugh like a truck driver……coming out of this beautiful girl,” Dustin Hoffman says in an interview clip. Of course, international fame isn’t without its problems. Older male interviewers questioned Twiggy about her weight, and wondered if her skinny frame would negatively influence teen girls. (The mainstream media body shamed women, even back in the day.) She calmly deflected the questions with just her natural personality, and showed remarkable poise for a teenage girl without a cadre of publicists and stylists. The crowd that greeted her in Manhattan inspired one of the iconic pop culture images of the ’60s -Melvin Sokolsky’s photo of Twiggy posing with dozens of fans wearing paper Twiggy masks. And she famously turned the tables on Woody Allen when he tried to embarrass her during an interview. She did occasionally succumb to pressure when overwhelmed. The reception by fans after her plane landed in Japan was so intense, she ran off crying.
Director Ken Russell mentored her as an actress. She starred in his musical film The Boyfriend. This kickstarted her acting and music career. Her relationship with de Villeneuve ended soon after. Even though Twiggy is best known as the iconic 1960s, model, she had a decades long career as an actress, dancer, recording artist, and even hosted her own variety show in the UK. Eventually, she came full circle, with a modeling assignment for Vogue Italia–and branched out into being a spokesmodel for British retailer Marks and Spencer during the third arc of her career. She received the title Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 2019. Twiggy’s life after her 1960s fame, turned out to be just as productive and certainly more varied than her early career, though not quite as flashy.
Twiggy lived most of her life in the public eye with no overarching pathos or scandals, and she comes across as a sharp, good-natured woman. Her life wasn’t entirely without tragedy. though. Her first husband, actor Michael Witney, was an on-again, off-again alcoholic. They were separated when he died at a restaurant while having lunch with their daughter. She’s been married to her second husband, actor/director Leigh Lawson, who she met through mutual friends, since 1988. Scenes from their idyllic lives together serve as bookends to the film.
Director Frost, a British actress and designer knows a thing or two about 1960s fashion. Her 2021 documentary, chronicled the life of another Mod-era fashion trailblazer, designer Mary Quant, in 2021. This documentary moves along briskly, with commentary from Brooke Shields, Zandra Rhodes, Dustin Hoffman, Twiggy’s fellow 1960s models Joanna Lumley and Pattie Boyd, Sienna Miller, and Paul McCartney, among others.
First broadcast on the BBC2 in 2024, Twiggy: The Woman Behind the Icon will be released on DVD September 22 in the US, and will be screened at select theatres.
