There were mononymous female stars before Twiggy. Cher, for example, was already famous by the time Nellie and Norman Hornby’s youngest daughter Lesley was reinvented as Twiggy in 1966. And there have been many since: Madonna, Adele, Beyonce, Rihanna…
But none of those other single names evoke a time and a place – London in the Swinging Sixties – as powerfully as Twiggy does. And by far the most absorbing part of Sadie Frost’s thoroughly enjoyable (if rather gushing) documentary concerns those eventful years.
Frost’s only previous documentary was about the designer Mary Quant, another woman synonymous with the Sixties.
But, as cultural icons go, even the redoubtable Quant was quickly eclipsed by the ‘shy, introspective’ working-class teenager from Neasden in north-west London.
It all started with a haircut. Looking for shampoo, 16-year-old Lesley popped into a posh Mayfair salon, House of Leonard, where Leonard himself spotted her and asked if she’d mind modelling his new pixie cut.
The cropping and bleaching took seven hours. She was then packed off to have photographs taken, the fashion editor of the Daily Express noticed them, and her life changed. She acquired a new name and was hailed as ‘The Face of ’66’.
Other celebrated models of the era pop up to recall what happened next, as Twiggy’s boyish 31-23-32 figure and her ‘gender-fluid little elfin face’, as Joanna Lumley puts it, made her the world’s pre- eminent supermodel.
Model Twiggy in red ribbed wool chenile cropped jumpsuit by Pattie Tuttman for Silverworm with a watch on each wrist
Press images from new film documentary Twiggy by Sadie Frost
Twiggy wearing a knit baby-doll dress with ribbed bodice by Juliano Knits, with thigh- high socks, a choker by Mary Smith, and braids by Edith Imre; she tugs at the hem of her dress
What didn’t happen next, even at the height on both sides of the Atlantic of so-called Twiggy-mania, was any hint of big-headedness. Paul McCartney points out that her blue-collar roots kept her grounded. ‘What you saw was what you got,’ he says. Not to mention what you heard. Another friend, Dustin Hoffman, fondly recalls her ‘truck-driver’s laugh’.
Twiggy herself, still beautiful at 75 and as engagingly down-to-earth as ever, delivers recollections throughout. She politely remembers Justin de Villeneuve, her boyfriend and manager in those early years, who did become too big for his trendy boots and was duly kicked into touch.
The appealing paradox of Twiggy is that for all her impressive versatility (she later forged parallel careers as a singer and a surprisingly good actress), she has never changed. She remains authentically herself, in a business in which not many are. Nor, despite the painful break-up of her first marriage to American actor Michael Witney (father of her only child, Carly, and a roaring alcoholic), does she appear to have any skeletons in her closet.
That might not make her the most compelling subject were it not for everything else in her closet: the clothes, the ineffable style, the indelible images. Frost’s documentary becomes steadily less interesting as she turns her gaze to the older Twiggy as the saviour of Marks & Spencer, the honour of being made a dame in 2019, and her long, seemingly blissful second marriage to actor and director Leigh Lawson.
But if only for the way it chronicles those tumultuous early years, it is a treat.
Writer-director Nick Love’s film Marching Powder, about a very different brand of working-class Londoner, is no kind of treat. That is, unless you savour multiple use of the C-word, in which dubious accomplishment it surely sets some kind of record. Danny Dyer plays Jack, a 45-year-old thug addicted to cocaine and football hooliganism.
After he is arrested following a street battle in Grimsby, a judge tells him he has six weeks to mend his ways or face jail. He must give up drugs and violence, which will jeopardise his status with his loutish, like-minded friends, but might help to repair his marriage to the long-suffering Dani (Stephanie Leonidas).
It is Dani’s father, a millionaire builder, to whom Jack owes his lavish lifestyle – but only for as long as he and Dani stay together. Unhelpfully, his father-in-law (who also funds a private education for Jack’s son JJ, played by Dyer’s real-life son Arty) then decrees that Jack must chaperone his bi-polar brother-in-law, Kenny Boy, just released from prison, making it a lot harder to stay on the straight and narrow. That’s pretty much it.
LOS ANGELES – 1967: English supermodel Twiggy poses for a portrait during the filming of ‘Twiggy in Hollywood’
Anyone who had the misfortune to see Love’s 2004 film The
Football Factory, also starring Dyer, will recognise the way it glorifies alpha-male brutishness while masquerading as an indictment of it.
I loathed pretty much every moment of this movie and its mannered, sub-Guy
Ritchie style, but it did remind me of a story I cherish. A few years ago, according to a policeman friend of mine, a bunch of middle-aged Aston Villa hooligans arranged a dust-up in a supermarket car park with a Crewe Alexandra gang before a pre-season friendly. When they arrived and realised their adversaries were kids, no older than 16, they advised them to go home before they got hurt.
Happily, the advice was taken. But the detail I have always loved is that the Crewe gang called themselves ‘The Crewetons’, thinking it made them sound hard, not that it evoked little fried cubes of bread floating on top of a wholesome soup.
All films are in cinemas now.
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