She was a teenager from Neasden when a photograph of her newly cropped hair catapulted her into a world of glamour and celebrity. “It happened almost overnight. One day I was an ordinary schoolgirl, and the next I was ‘the face of 1966’. It was madness but wonderful,” said Twiggy, the former model, actor and fashion designer.
Now her story is being made into a musical written and directed by the author, playwright and satirist Ben Elton and starring Elena Skye as Twiggy.
“I’m very flattered that someone as talented as Ben wanted to do this,” said Twiggy, 73, who grew up as Lesley Hornby and was made a dame in 2019 for services to fashion, the arts and charity. “It’s his project – it just happens to be about me.” She and Elton have been friends for years.
Elton, who has written several other musicals and plays, said there was “a lot more [to Twiggy’s story] besides the fabulous glamour and ‘pizzazz’ of the 60s, and the Cinderella story of a single haircut that made a 16-year-old from Neasden the most famous teenager in the world”.
The period “felt like a time of endless possibilities, a different Britain, when for a brief shining moment working-class people really had their shot, from the Beatles for about 10 years onwards. It was very cool, very fashionable and almost imperative to be working-class, and those that weren’t pretended they were. It was a period when social mobility exploded.”
That was no longer the case, he added. “‘Levelling up’ has to be the stupidest, ugliest and most meaningless phrase they’ve ever come up with. Not least because they haven’t done any of it, whatever it meant in the first place.”
Twiggy said: “I didn’t grow up thinking I wanted to be a model because it wasn’t in my consciousness. I grew up in a nice, working-class family. I was never aware that we didn’t have things, but we weren’t rich by any stretch of the imagination. And for girls like me, being a model wasn’t an option as a job.
“If you think of all the models before me, they were usually middle- or upper-class, and some went to finishing schools. They modelled until they got married. I was probably the first working-class model.”
As well as snobbery, Twiggy faced sexism, said Elton – “although less so than you might think. She was very tough.”
Close Up – the Twiggy Musical will not duck the difficulties of the model’s early life, when her mother had spells in a psychiatric hospital, on occasion involving electrotherapy, then akin to “a sledgehammer”, said Elton.
“Her mother’s mental illness was a central part of her childhood. Her relationship with her father was especially important because he took on so much of the raising of three girls while their mother was away.”
After a few years of modelling, Twiggy was invited to star in The Boy Friend, a film by Ken Russell – “the hottest film director of his day”, she said – for which she won two Golden Globes at the age of 21. The role led to other acting parts, albums, television series, fashion design and her current podcast, Tea with Twiggy.
“She is an astonishing person of talent, but those three years [as a model] defined her,” said Elton. “Those photographs remain evocative and filled with charm and confidence. It’s like looking at the Beatles – you can’t help feeling a bit uplifted.”
The 1960s were “amazing”, said Twiggy. “London was the focus of fashion and music and art. But when you’re living through a time like that, you don’t wake up in the morning and think, ‘I’m living in an amazing time,’ you just get on with your life. I never look back now and say, ‘Oh, I wish it was that again.’ Because I’m still having an amazing time.”
The production is a play with songs, a story interspersed with musical numbers from the era. “It’s a jukebox musical – and I love that phrase. I don’t think it’s an insult, at least for me,” said Elton. “Jukeboxes are the homes of dreams, they’re the most beautiful things.”
Close Up is one of three musicals being staged back-to-back at the Menier Chocolate Factory theatre, near London’s Borough market, this year. A musical adaptation of Graham Greene’s thriller The Third Man, set in postwar Vienna, directed by Trevor Nunn, will start the season, and it will end with a “reinvention” of Stephen Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures.
Close Up – the Twiggy Musical, written and directed by Ben Elton, is at the Menier Chocolate Factory from 16 September until 18 November
