Supermodel Dorian Leigh, Model Blazed Trail in Fashion, Dies
Category : Women Diary, Women Lifestyle, Women Fashion, Women Career
Dorian Leigh, one of the world’s first supermodels, whose signature work for Revlon’s “Fire and Ice” advertisements remains renowned on Madison Avenue, died Monday at Sunrise of Falls Church, Va. She was 91 and had Alzheimer’s disease.
Ironically, so many years after she became famous in the 1940s and 1950s, there may not be a supermodel who has yet surpassed Dorian Leigh. She not only managed to model throughout the 40s and 50s but segued from acting to writing to owning her own modeling agency. As someone who grew up seeing her face on the covers of many Vogue magazines as well as other magazine covers, she seemed to be everywhere. Pick up a magazine and odds were high you’d see Dorian Leigh’s face staring back at you. Walk up to a cosmetics counter and she’d be the cool, yet oddly passionate, face behind those Fire and Ice cosmetics ads for Revlon.
Leigh appeared on the cover of many magazines including McCall’s and Harper’s Bazaar. She signed on with Ford Agency and founder Eileen Ford called Leigh “truly the best model of our time.”
“She instinctively knew what every photographer wanted, and she came alive just at the moment the shutter clicked,” Ford said.
Ms. Leigh founded a successful modeling agency in Paris and ran it for eight years before opening a restaurant in France in the mid-1960s. She later cooked for domestic diva Martha Stewart, ran her own catering business in New York and Washington, and wrote several well-received cookbooks and an autobiography.
Leigh’s mystique was enhanced by her many romances, which included five marriages — counting the one in Mexico to a Spanish marquis who turned out to be already married. There were also the many real or imagined affairs with famous writers, musicians and photographers, eagerly tabulated by gossip columnists. Leigh was definitely attractive, standing 5 feet 5 inches, with an hourglass figure and an alluring smile.
After Leigh left modeling in the 1960s, she started her own fashion modeling agency in Paris, among the first in France. In late life, Leigh dabbled in another field: “She was a rabid Democrat, very much into the politics,” Hawkins said. She joined a local Democratic group in the early 1990s, while living in a conservative enclave in Fredericksburg, Va.
Perhaps mindful of models’ concerns about diet, she included a recipe in the fritter book for low-fat, low-cholesterol chocolate doughnuts.
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