Daily Mail, Tuesday February 8th, 2004
How I Learned To Love My Wrinkles

Twiggy has five favourite adjectives. 'Wonderful' is right there at number one. 'Gorgeous' is second )but it's a close call). Then there's 'amazing', 'brilliant' and , a bit further down, the aberrant 'worrying'.

Her family quite properly fall into the 'gorgeous' and 'wonderful' categories, while the charity Age Concern and the actress Sheila Hancock are merely 'absolutely wonderful'.

Then comes the litany if 'worrying' things; Botox, face-lifts, boob jobs, hot air ballooning and diving.

This profligacy with the word 'wonderful' points to a certain guileless buoyancy: at 55, Twiggy is an upbeat person. Her life has never been complicated by therapy or analysis. She has survived fame and adulation with a mix of good humour and common sense.

She has dealt privately with triumph and tragedy, emerging unscathed and strengthened. Twiggy has never been a risk-taker: hence the caution, the anxiety over needless surgery, the instinct to avoid the reckless.

It is almost 40 years since she was pitched overnight from suburban nonentity to global celebrity; an androgynous, waif-like 16-year-old discovered by chance in a hair salon, who became the Face of 1966 and the archetype of the Swinging Sixties.

Forever crystallised in the public consciousness as this iconic model, Twiggy exuded a Bambi-like innocence in an era of sexual licence.

She didn’t do drugs. She barely drank. She eschewed parties and returned home early each night to her doting family in the uneventful London suburb of Neasden. here she indulged in her favourite pastime -  sewing. All of which accounts for why she is still radiating youthful good health, extolling her blissfully happy marriage and endorsing a new campaign to persuade companies to tailor advertising to the over-50s.

She is keen to stipulate, though, that she Is not the face if Age Concern.

'The charity was absolutely wonderful to my mum-in-law, Caroline, who died three years igo, aged 92,’ says Twiggy. ‘She was a strong, independent woman who wanted to live on her own. They visited once a reek and she knew she could phone them if she needed help. So when they asked me to be a voice for them, I agreed. ‘You see beautiful 20-year-old’s promoting anti-wrinkle cream and it’s daft, wrong, stupid. We need more mature people advertising products. Look at Honor Blackman — gorgeous. lie is 77 and doing adverts for Marks & Spencer.’ Twiggy rails against the reluctance of employers to take on the over-60s and says she never intends to retire. ‘I hope I’ll still be acting at 90 (if I can remember my lines!). I wish there was more work for older actresses. Take Sheila Hancock. The reviews for her latest play said: “A superstar is born.” Absolutely wonderful!’

Now middle-aged, Twiggy looks preternaturally ­girlish. She feels at g=home with her mature shape. ‘I’ve got boobs now. I didn’t have them for and years,’ she says. I’m grateful for my lines of wisdom ~. Of course, there are days when I think: “Oh my gawd, I look a bit tired.” But I can pull it together if I have to. Worrying about getting older is a lost cause and selfish.’

She is a vociferous opponent of Botox. ‘It’s a poison. It’s just too worrying. Are they going to discover it in 20 years time in people’s bloodstreams?’.

She would never contemplate breast enlargement. ‘It’s putting something foreign in your body,’ she says. Neither has she succumbed to cosmetic surgery: ‘It’s the knife that concerns me. I hope that if I ever decide I need it they’ll just zap me with a laser.’

Neither has she endorsed diets. Eat healthily has always been her mantra. Although her six-and-a-half stone frame and stick-thin limbs earned her a nickname and a fortune, she detested her teenage figure.

‘I hated what I looked like; a funny, skinny little thing. I was like a boy, with no chest, though I always ate well. If I’d had a fairy godmother, I’d have asked to be Brenda Lee, with a pinched-in waist, a pointed brassiere and a big skirt.

‘But I came along at the start of the Sixties revolution and I seemed to epitomise it. But I was never a rebel — It’s either in you or It isn’t.

‘In a way, the Sixties passed me by. I was so busy. I was always travelling and working. I’ve always been disciplined. It was a dangerous time for young people: drink, drugs. I’ve seen the casualties.’

Twiggy’s early relationships were unpropitious. Her first boyfriend and manager, Justin de Villeneuve, was ten years her senior, and the relationship lasted seven years.

When she was 23 — and an actress with two Golden Globes for her film debut in Ken Russell’s The Boy Friend

— she left him for the American actor Michael Whitney, then 42. They married before Twiggy realised he had suffered alcohol

‘I try to remember the happy times — because we did have them -  and the fact that if I hadn’t married Michael I wouldn’t have my gorgeous girl,’ says Twiggy; And I’m just very lucky I met Leigh. He has been a wonderful dad to Carly.’ She and actor Leigh Lawson have been together 20 years and their children are firm friends. Leigh’s son Jason, a theatre director, from his previous marriage to the actress Hayley Mills, shares a fiat with .Carly, 28, an animator.

She says: ‘Leigh and I have been given a second chance. We feel blessed.’ They divide their time between homes in West London and the country

I ask if a passionate sex life is the key to her youthful bloom. ‘Mind your own business,’ she says, briskly but not unkindly.

Unlike many wealthy over-50s, she does not seek the thrill of new adventure. ‘I’d hate to go to the North Pole, or diving. If I saw a shark, I’d get hysterical.’ She remains canny with money and can’t resist a bargain. When we meet, she is wearing drainpipe jeans, cow­boy boots and a chain-store hacking jacket (‘brilliantly cut and very reasonable,’ she says). She teams the fashionably bohemian look with teenage accessories: a pink glass ring and rock ‘ii’ roll belt.

Crucially — and this is one of her most endearing traits —Twiggy has never lost her girl­ish sense of wonder. Her laugh­ter is raucous and frequent.

‘Aha-ha-ha!’ she goes, like a pantomime villain. Midway through a sentence, she breaks off to admire three ducks flying in perfect formation.

‘Look at that! Look!’ she insists. ‘That’s hysterical: like those three china ducks people used to have on the wall.’

I ask how she’d like to grow old. ‘Gracefully and a little eccentrically’ she says. ‘And I’d like to have fun.’

What would be her epitaph? ‘Aha-ha-ha! I haven’t thought about that one, I dunno.”

I can think of nothing better than: ‘It was wonderful! Gorgeous! Amazing! Brilliant!”

Picture: Brian Aris. 
Interview: Fraces Hardy.

With thanks to Ray Sanders

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