Publisher: CinemaSerf March 12, 2025
This reminded me a little of the “Quant” (2021) documentary as it took us on a career retrospective of a woman who did take the world by storm in the 1960s. Using an extensive array of archive and some contributors who avoided the pitfalls of adulation, we get not just a sense of just how successful she was, but of the scope of an industry that was brutal, fickle and lucrative - if you got the luck and stayed the course. She is an engaging lady who does have a look about her that reeks of appreciation. She knows that she was in the right place at the right time and has worked hard ever since to stay at the top of a global game that’s not for the feint hearted. Former fellow model Dame Joanna Lumley adds some insight into just how tough it was, and there is added input from more recent treaters of the catwalk, as well as a few industry insiders (though not, curiously, Dame Anna Wintour) to add a bit of soul to a story of a woman not without her ups and downs as she moved from modelling to acting - on film and on stage, most notably “The Boyfriend” in 1971; singing and she even had her own peak-time television series a bit like Lulu. She comes across as quite an humble and down to earth character and with ninety minutes of nostalgia from just about every media there is to augment this biography, it’s well worth watching and remembering the clothes we wore, the cars we drove and some of the films we watched and wished we hadn’t.