Arresting intelligence and intoxicating sexuality
Dorian Leigh, who combined pristine blue eyes, curling eyelashes, an arresting intelligence and intoxicating sexuality to become one of history’s most photographed models — perhaps the first to truly merit the adjective super — died Monday in Falls Church, Va. She was 91.
Dorian was truly the best model of our time,” Eileen Ford, the doyenne of the modeling agency industry, said in an interview with The Roanoke Times in 1997. “She instinctively knew what every photographer wanted, and she came alive just at the moment the shutter clicked.”
Cecil Beaton wrote in his book “Photobiography” (1951) that Ms. Leigh was as demanding as the eminent photographers who shot her, including Louise Dahl-Wolfe and Irving Penn.
He said she could convey many moods, including “the sweetness of an 18-century pastel, the allure of a Sargent portrait, of the poignancy of some unfortunate woman who sat for Modigliani.”
Ms. Leigh’s mystique was enhanced by her many romances, which included five marriages — counting the one in Mexico to a Spanish marquis who turned out to be already married. There were also the many real or imagined affairs with famous writers, musicians and photographers, eagerly tabulated by gossip columnists. Ms. Leigh was definitely attractive, standing 5 feet 5 inches, with an hourglass figure and an alluring smile.
“She had so much estrogen, like some men are full of testosterone,” Carmen Dell’Orefice, who started modeling in 1945, a year before Ms. Leigh, said in an interview with Vanity Fair in 2006. “Dorian was so sexy without saying a word. And she was her own person.”
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