Sophie Dahl Channels Marilyn Monroe for Harpers Bazaar

With her blonde curls, pin up curves and baby blue eyes Sophie Dahl has faced the inevitable comparisons to Marilyn Monroe throughout her modelling career.

She hung up her catwalk heels years ago, but the best-selling author has now returned to her cover girl roots, posing for a special Harper's Bazaar UK shoot to celebrate the centenary of Monroe's birth.

Dahl, 48, looks the spitting image of the Hollywood icon in the stunning set of images, which are a collaboration with her friend, the make-up artist Lisa Eldridge MBE, who has created a new Marilyn Monroe-inspired make-up collection.

Inspired by famous photographs of Monroe taken by Sam Shaw on the beach in Amagansett, Long Island, Dahl pouts and poses in lace lingerie and a clinging white dress, emulating the relaxed, off-duty vibes of the original 1957 shoot.

Alongside the shoot, Dahl has written a personal essay about the influence the late movie icon has had on her life. 

Dahl recalls how she had her first glimpse of Monroe when staying with her father, the late Carry On actor Julian Holloway, as a child and immediately decided that she 'was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.'

'I was seven years old on the morning I saw her, a hazy princess on the cover of a book called The Last Sitting [by the photographer Bert Stern],' she writes.

'Smiling through a tangle of bedsheets and platinum-blonde hair, she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.'

Dahl went on to explain how Monroe helped forge a lasting bond between her and her father, who split from her mother Tessa Dahl shortly after her birth. 

'I didn't realise it until recently, but for my father and me, Marilyn was a luminous field beyond wrongdoing,' she said.

'I bought him a poster of her – a George Barris print from a mall in Santa Monica – with my pocket money when I was 13.'

'He framed it and hung it in his sitting-room. Wherever he moved, it was always pride of place, Marilyn, the surf behind her, sparkling and full of promise.'

The magazine shoot marks a return to modelling for Dahl, who gave up her fashion career in 2007 to focus on writing, following in the footsteps of her author grandfather Roald Dahl.

Dahl's modelling career began when she was while sobbing on the street outside a Mayfair restaurant. 

During her hugely successful career, she was the face of Versace and Alexander McQueen, and appeared on many international fashion-magazine covers.

Her 2000 nude campaign images for Yves Saint Laurent's Opium fragrance famously caused a near-record number of complaints to the UK's Advertising Standards Authority.

She has been married to the singer Jamie Callum for 16 years, with whom she shares two daughters - Lyra, 15, and Margot, 13.