TWIGGY

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Storyline (warning: spoilers)

Frost’s documentary follows the working-class Londoner taking bad luck in her stride as she progresses from fashion to film stardom and back again. It 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.) 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 subject to incessant sexist questioning about her body, she retained her good humour – perhaps because it never occurred to her to do anything else. 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. Frost’s film shows that Twiggy’s life has had its share of heartbreaks. Her original boyfriend-slash-manager Nigel Davies, became an unfaithful controlling figure. Their relationship ended just as Twiggy broke through to mega-fame in the US. She later married actor Michael Witney who, after they divorced, died of a heart attack at a restaurant in front of their young daughter.
These events are not represented here as 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.