Elle Macpherson
Birth name	Eleanor Nancy Gow
Date of birth	29 March 1963 (1963-03-29) (age 46)
Place of birth	Cronulla, Sydney, Australia
Height	6' (1.83 m)1
Hair colour	light brown
Eye colour	brown
Measurements	36C-25-351
Spouse(s)	Gilles Bensimon (1982 - 1989) (divorced) Arpad Busson (1995 - 2005) (partner)
Official website

Elle Macpherson (pronounced /ˈɛl məkˈfɝːsən/; born 29 March 1963) is an Australian model, actress, philanthropist and businesswoman. She is best known for her record five cover appearances for the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue from the 1980s and '90s and into the 2000s. She is also known as the founder and public face of a series of business ventures including Elle Macpherson Intimates, a lingerie line, and "The Body", a line of skin care products. According to Forbes, she is worth around £60 million.

Biography

Early life

Macpherson was born in Cronulla, Sydney, the daughter of Peter Gow, a former president of Sydney rugby league club, the Cronulla Sharks.² Her mother Frances worked as a nurse before she married. Elle grew up in Killara, a North Shore suburb of Sydney, and attended Killara High School. She is the eldest of four children including activist Mimi Macpherson. Macpherson’s parents divorced when she was 10, and she moved with her mother and two siblings. Her mother remarried, and a mistake registering at a new school meant that her name was changed from her father's, Gow, to her stepfather's, Macpherson.³⁴

Rise to fame

At age 17, planning to follow in her stepfather's footsteps, Elle enrolled to study law at Sydney University.⁵ Before starting college, she visited the United States with the intent of spending her gap year modeling in order to pay for her university education. Macpherson traveled to New York, where she initially signed with Click Model Management. It was to be the beginning of a 25-year stay.

Her career properly began in 1982 with a television commercial for Tab Cola that established her as a "girl next door" figure in Australia.⁶ By 1986, Time Magazine had already put her on the cover (with a feature entitled "The Big Elle"); she had by that time also been featured on the covers of Elle, GQ, Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, Tatler, and Playboy.^{citation needed}

Already possessing worldwide name recognition, Macpherson cemented her high profile through frequent appearances in Elle magazine, where she appeared in every issue for six straight years. During this time she married, when she was 21, Elle Creative Director Gilles Bensimon.⁷

Eventually she gained even more exposure through Sports Illustrated magazine’s annual swimsuit issue. She appeared on the cover a record five times, in 1986, 1987, 1988, 1994 and 2006. Her popularity had reached such a level that Australian government offered her a post on its tourist commission as an unofficial ambassador.⁸

Business career

In the 1980s, together with Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell, Paulina Porizkova and Cindy Crawford, Macpherson became part of the first generation of supermodels. Among this elite grouping, however, she began to display a singular ability to create and manage her own business properties. In 1994, she shocked the modeling world^{citation needed} by parting from her prestigious agency, Ford Models, to work more lucratively for her own company, Elle Macpherson Inc. This company would serve as a financial and organizational base for her later endeavors.⁹


She soon went on to produce her own highly popular series of calendars, each of which was accompanied by a making of television program in 1992, 1993, 1994. She used this success as a springboard to create the "Your Personal Best -- The Body" series of workout videos.⁹

Macpherson later diversified her portfolio of businesses, and in 1990 launched her eponymous lingerie collection Elle Macpherson Intimates in partnership with Bendon Limited Apparel. Intimates met with remarkable international success, becoming the single best-selling lingerie line in both Great Britain¹⁰ and Australia¹¹ Breaking the mold of many spokesmodels, Macpherson took an active role in the development and management of the company, serving as Chief Marketing Officer and later Creative Director. While nursing her second child, she spearheaded the development of a signature maternity bra line.¹² Intimates has retained a high brand recognition into the 2000s, appearing as a featured brand on America's Next Top Model.

More recently she created her own label of beauty products: Elle Macpherson - The Body. She has launched or served as spokesmodel for campaigns by Boots,¹³ Invisible Zinc,¹⁴ and Hot Tuna.¹⁵

The BBC series The Money Programme aired a documentary which followed the supermodel turned entrepreneur Macpherson through her day-to-day business as she continued to develop her international lingerie business.

In March 2008, Elle signed a 3-year spokesperson deal with Revlon. She has since been featured in print and advertising campaigns.¹⁶

Elle Macpherson is currently signed to G2 Entertainment.

Has her own wax statue at London's Madame Tussaud's.

Acting career

Macpherson made her movie debut playing an artist's model in the 1994 Sirens, which starred Hugh Grant, Sam Neill, Tara Fitzgerald, Kate Fischer and co-starred Portia de Rossi. Macpherson gained 9 kg (20lb) to disguise her athletic frame for the period role.¹⁷ After Sirens, Macpherson followed with a 2-year series of acting roles, appearing in films such as Woody Allen’s Alice, Batman & Robin alongside George Clooney, The Edge with Anthony Hopkins, and The Mirror Has Two Faces with Barbara Streisand.

In 1999, Macpherson appeared in five episodes of the United States sitcom Friends as Joey's roommate and girlfriend, Janine Lecroix. Macpherson went on to film Jane Eyre with William Hurt and has also appeared alongside Ben Stiller and Sarah Jessica Parker in If Lucy Fell. Her most controversial acting is the Showtime cable network miniseries A Girl Thing in which she plays a woman experimenting with bisexuality alongside Kate Capshaw.

In early 2009, it has been reported that "The Body" went on a business venture trip to Montreal, Canada alongside Mischa Barton and Ashton Kutcher in attempt to shoot a sample of the proposed reality show A Beautiful Life, which would talk about aspiring models working for a modeling agency, trying to make it big in the Big Apple and in the Fashion World. ¹⁸

Extortion attempt

On July 12 and 23, 1997, William Ryan Holt and Michael Mischler burgled Macpherson's Los Angeles home while she was on business in Chicago. The pair stole an estimated $100,000 worth of jewelery, $6,000 in cash, and nude photographs. The two were arrested on 4 August 1997.¹⁹

Mischler, 29, admitted one count of attempted extortion and one count of burglary. He received a six year, eight month sentence. Holt, 26, a former Air Force serviceman and a military inmate on parole, admitted one count of extortion and was sentenced to a year in jail.

Humanitarian and philanthropic work

Macpherson is a European Ambassador for RED, an initiative set up by Bono and Bobby Shriver to raise money and awareness for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria²⁰ to help eradicate AIDS for women and children in Africa; she is also an ambassador for UNICEF. ²¹ In her native Australia, she is an ambassador for the Smile Foundation, which helps the families of children with rare diseases and organizes government research grants.⁴

Personal life

After briefly dating singer–songwriter Billy Joel, Macpherson met Gilles Bensimon in 1982 on a shoot for Elle magazine. The couple married in 1985 but divorced after 4 years together in 1989.⁷

Macpherson has two sons with her former long-term boyfriend, French financier Arpad Busson: Arpad Flynn Alexander Busson (born 14 February 1998) and Aurelius Cy Andrea Busson (born 4 February 2003), known as Flynn and Cy respectively. The couple started their relationship in 1995 and were engaged in August 2002 but separated in July 2005.^{citation needed} Recently she was reported to be dating canadian singer Bryan Adams.

Macpherson currently resides in the United Kingdom, where she raises her two children.

She speaks French fluently, and is conversational in Italian and Spanish.²²

Filmography

Further reading

• Celebrity1000.com -- profile for Elle MacPherson^sic
• SouthCoast Today, 24 July 1997, "Elle Macpherson says she was the victim of burglary..."
• SouthCoast Today, 6 December 1997, "Two men pleaded guilty..."
• The Smoking Gun
• Elle is also a Patron for NACOA, the National Association for Children of Alcoholics.
• "Elle is dating canadian singer Bryan Adams."

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Elle Macpherson

• Elle Macpherson at the Internet Movie Database
• Elle MacPherson^sic at Fashion Model Directory
• Elle Macpherson interview by Harper's Bazaar Australia (Oct 2007)
• Elle Macpherson on AskMen.com
• Elle Macpherson interviewed by Ginny Dougary (2005)
• Elle MacPherson^sic at TV.com
• Elle MacPherson^sic