Forever
Twiggy
The face
of London in the 1960s is living her best life at the age of 77.
Rhonda
Garelick
By Rhonda
Garelick
Published
Sept. 16, 2026
Updated
Sept. 17, 2026, 1:35 p.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/16/style/twiggy-documentary.html
When
16-year-old Lesley Hornby, the British model known for her skinny frame,
freckles, blond pixie cut and blue eyes fringed with heavy false lashes, was
discovered in 1966 by a fashion editor, her look hit like a lightning bolt.
Twiggy,
as she was instantly renamed, was nothing like the models popular at that time
— sultry, mature, upper class-coded women like Jean Shrimpton. She was from a
working-class family — her father was a carpenter. At 5-foot-6 she was petite
and almost childlike.
“I didn’t
look like the models of that day,” Twiggy, now nearly 77, said over coffee last
week at Bottino restaurant in Manhattan. “Girls from working-class families
didn’t become models.”
But a new
era was dawning in the 1960s; music and fashion were all about youth, openness
and social mobility. Twiggy seemed to embody London’s youthquake, and its mod
scene, telegraphing fresh energy and new possibilities.
Twiggy’s
famous face launched a thousand commodities, a marketing tool for cosmetics,
clothes and lunch boxes. But her real-life story, which unfolds in the director
Sadie Frost’s thoughtful 2025 documentary, “Twiggy: The Woman Behind the Icon,”
which arrives in America this month, continued long after the youthquake
subsided.
An
Unusual Celebrity Story
It’s easy
to see traces of the young Twiggy in her still youthful face. Her hair remains
blond; bangs still frame her blue eyes. And she still goes by the moniker
Twiggy.
Aging
doesn’t bother her. “I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about what I look
like,” she said. “If you start getting into that, about, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got
this wrinkle and that wrinkle…’” She trailed off, but her point was clear: She
is comfortable in her skin.
Rather
than flatten herself to fit her cartoonlike status, Twiggy used fame to explore
myriad art forms over a 60-year career, including film, theater, fashion
design, dance and singing, proving gifted at all of them.
After
four years as a model, working with photographers including Barry Lategan
(whose early photos first got Twiggy noticed), Cecil Beaton, Bert Stern,
Richard Avedon and Helmut Newton, she moved on to cinema. The director Ken
Russell was so impressed with her that, although she had no acting, singing or
dancing experience, he cast her as the lead in his 1971 film musical, “The Boy
Friend,” opposite co-stars Christopher Gable, who’d danced with the Royal
Ballet, and Tommy Tune, already a Broadway star. Russell sent her to singing
and dance classes, which she plunged into with enthusiasm.
She
learned to tap in a year. “It was harder for Chris Gable to learn tap than for
me, because ballet dancers do everything turned out,” she said, remembering
with a laugh that she’d had an advantage in this over her professional ballet
star colleague.
That film
role earned Twiggy two Golden Globes. She went on to star on the London stage
and appeared in dozens of films and television shows. She recorded albums and
designed fashion lines. In 1983, she co-starred with her old friend Tommy Tune
in a Broadway revival of the Gershwin musical, “My One and Only,” which earned
her a Tony nomination.
“He’s
another one who changed my life,” she said of Tune. “He always takes my breath
away. He’s elegance personified.”
Frost’s
documentary shows Twiggy coping with crowds lunging toward her, talk show hosts
leeringly asking about her body, and even an interview, while still a teen,
with Woody Allen, who badgers her with condescending questions, including
“Who’s your favorite philosopher?” Twiggy met every situation with polite but
firm answers. “Who’s your favorite philosopher?” she asks Allen, stunning him
into silence.
Poised
and Protected
What
explains such poise? Twiggy’s eyes filled as she gestured heavenward and
replied, “One hundred percent Norman,” referring to the father she adored. “Dad
became my rock when Mum would go into hospital,” she explained. Nell Hornby
struggled with mental illness throughout Twiggy’s childhood, disappearing
periodically into psychiatric wards, leaving Norman to care for their three
daughters. (Twiggy was the youngest.) “He kept me kind of away from it,” she
said. “Protected.”
Perhaps
even more important was the steadfast love Norman showed his ill wife. Twiggy
recalls that, when asked why he “put up with Nell,” Norman would simply say,
“Because I love her.”
In
addition to her father, she found a protector during her early modeling years
in her then-boyfriend and manager, Justin de Villeneuve, who despite his
evident peccadilloes, kept her safe. “He looked after me,” she said. “I was a
kid, but nobody touched me.”
Twiggy
weathered other storms over the years, especially the sudden death of her first
husband, the actor Michael Witney, when their daughter Carly was just turning
five. Happily remarried for nearly four decades to the actor, writer and
director Leigh Lawson, she’s a doting grandmother to Carly’s two children and
surrounded by adoring friends, many of whom figure in Frost’s film, including
Dustin Hoffman, Fran Drescher (whose show, “The Nanny” was inspired by her
friendship with Twiggy), the actress Joanna Lumley, Paul McCartney and Stella
McCartney (who designed the cream tuxedo Twiggy wore in 2019 to receive her
damehood at Buckingham Palace).
The day
we met she wore a cream blouse, maroon and cream patterned pants by Zara, white
trainers and a maroon leather jacket from her erstwhile midpriced Twiggy line
at Marks & Spencer. “I’m not a big high-end fashion buyer,” she said,
adding: “I can’t wear high heels. I hate them.”
Her
obvious ease with herself accounts for her ongoing appeal, to women in her own
age bracket and even to very young people. The majority of Twiggy’s fan mail,
which she answers herself, comes, she said, from 14- to 25-year-olds. This is
likely due in part to the perennial interest in ’60s fashion, but it speaks
also to the timeless quality of that “Twiggy” icon, or as she describes her
image, “this little person who kind of sits on my shoulder and never goes
away.”
Rhonda
Garelick is the founding director of the Institute for Public Humanities and
Arts at Hofstra University, where she is also a distinguished professor of
literature. She is the author of “Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of
History,” the forthcoming “Why Fashion Matters” and other books.
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