Daily Echo, Monday May 26th, 2003

Style icon Twiggy in new guise by Hilary Porter
She was one of the world's first supermodels - a waif like school girl who would become the look of the swinging sixties.
Lesley Hornby was just 15 years old when she was discovered, but within weeks she had changed her name to Twiggy, was being photographed by Bailey, Donovan and Duffy and was on the cover of every fashionable magazine.
If anyone told her then that 40 years later she would still be a household name and would be starring in a play by George Bernard Shaw, she would have thought someone had slipped something mind expanding into her coffee.
But life is often stranger than the most bizzarely imagined fiction and tonight Twiggy arrives at Lighthouse in Poole to play the title role GBS's witty morality play, Mrs Warren's Profession.
Twiggy is thrilled to be doing the play on an 11 week UK tour.
"It's a great play and a great part and of Bernard Shaw's greatest plays, Mrs Warren is a a great part because of her profession - ex-prostitute - she's bawdy, rowdy and it's great fun."
The play is set in rural Surrey at the end of the 19th century and finds the enterprising Mrs Warren running a chain of brothels across Europe to finance the Cambridge education of her daughter.
Banned for 25 years after it was first written, the play addresses issues like sexual liberation, hypocrisy and self-delusion - subjects that are as relevant today as they were when Mrs Warren's Profession first appeared on stage.
Twiggy did a lot of preparation for the part. "I had to put everything on hold and locked myself in my room to learn the lines. I read about the Victorian era and prostitution in that day and all about how the play had originally been banned.
"I also read a lot of books about women's lib, which the play addresses even though it was unheard of then, and all about class and morality. It was interesting that it was considered OK for men to go to prostitutes but not for women to be prostitutes."
How does she feel about being known as Twiggy even after all these years?
"My family and friends called me Twigs or Twigala and an early boyfriend called me Sticks. I was 15 and a half when I was discovered and a journalist of the time picked up on this and named me Twiggy - The Face Of '66 and that was it.
"Now, only my sisters call me Lesley. You don't have a choice with a nickname so it doesn't bother me. - it done me proud!"
She might have been thin, but: "In the early days I ate rubbish like all teenagers.
"I used to eat like a horse and desperately tried to put on weight. I hated being thin but I'm glad now because as you get older it is harder to keep weight off."
Looking back, she admits her life has been quite extraordinary.
"It happened so fast for me. One day I was at school and the next I was modelling in New York and Paris and going to LA and meeting film stars.
"Before that I had to wanted to do fashion design. I'd always loved clothes and had been making outfits since I was 12. My mum made clothes for me and my two sisters for economic reasons.
"Even today I make my own clothes. At the moment I am making curtains and bedspreads for our country house."
What's her advice for aspiring models? "It's very difficult and it's very much luck of the draw in the beginning but if you really want to do something you should go for it because when you hit 40 you will think "if only"!"

• Mrs Warren's Profession opens at Lighthouse tonight and runs until Saturday. It is directed by Sir Peter Hall, founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company and head of the Royal National Theatre.