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This feelgood film directed by Sadie Frost is about the 60s fashion icon Twiggy; originally Lesley Hornby from Neasden in London, latterly Lesley Lawson after her marriage to actor Leigh Lawson, and then Dame Lesley Lawson with her DBE in 2019. (That is how she was gazetted, at all events, although Dame Twiggy has a ring to it.) With comments from A-listers including Edward Enninful and Suzy Menkes, it tells us the story of a working-class heroine with an almost eerily beautiful gamine face who became a fashion legend with a pop-star status that eluded earlier figures such as Jean Shrimpton, though without the smouldering attitude of the supermodel generation that came later.
Twiggy made a glorious success of her life, and never conformed to any tragic narrative about how triumph in the ephemeral world of fashion and fame must surely be punished with disaster. Subject to incessant sexist questioning about her body, she retained her good humour – perhaps because it never occurred to her to do anything else – and was at the centre of stunning fashion pictures in the late 60s, including Melvin Sokolsky’s amazing, quasi-Warholian shot of Twiggy in New York surrounded by people in Twiggy masks – surely one of the most vivid images of celebrity in modern times.
Twiggy quit fashion aged 22, went into movies, where she became a double Golden Globe winner for starring in Ken Russell’s The Boy Friend, and got a Tony nomination for starring on Broadway in George and Ira Gershwin’s musical My One and Only. She had a hit TV show where guests included Bing Crosby and Bryan Ferry and showed herself to have a lovely singing voice. And then she gracefully segued back into fashion. It’s an extraordinary career and the curious fact is that although Twiggy is not known for being a movie or stage actor, those awards and nominations would appear to show she has done better than many who are far better known in those fields.
Frost’s film shows that Twiggy’s life has had its share of heartbreaks. Her original boyfriend-slash-manager Nigel Davies, who renamed himself Justin de Villeneuve and gave her her epithet (an inspired expansion of her erstwhile nickname Twigs), became an oppressive and unfaithful controlling figure. Their relationship ended just as Twiggy broke through to mega-fame in the US; De Villeneuve is not interviewed here, however. She later married and divorced actor Michael Witney who, after they split, died of a heart attack at a restaurant in front of their young daughter.
These events are not represented here as serious setbacks or dark-night-of-the-soul crises. Maybe they actually weren’t. Maybe Twiggy, in her admirably no-nonsense and uncomplaining way, just got on with it, like a member of the royal family. And whatever misogyny and snobbery she undoubtedly faced clearly had no effect at all on her success. Perhaps her life story doesn’t resonate all that far beyond her own CV, but this is a likable documentary about an eminently likable person.
