Suzy Parker

Sensational 1950s model who made a second career in movies

Cecelia Anne Renee Parker (Suzy Parker), model and actress: born New York 28 October 1933; three times married (two sons, two daughters); died Montecito, California 3 May 2003.

Christian Dior called her "the most beautiful woman in the world". Suzy Parker was one of the most recognisable faces of the 1950s and a model who, in the words of the photographer Milton H. Greene, "defined elegance".

Parker, whose beautiful bone structure, svelte figure and red hair lent her a striking presence, was regarded as the "signature face" for the designs of Coco Chanel, and she was also a favourite model of Richard Avedon. In the film Funny Face, in which Fred Astaire played a character based on Avedon, Parker was seen in the film's first musical number, "Think Pink", wafting in slow motion gowned in pink satin. Her screen acting roles, which included films with Cary Grant and Gary Cooper, brought her complaints of glacial stiffness, but in person she was considered a wacky intellectual and free spirit similar to the character played by Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face.

She was loquacious – she said she talked too much for most men – and was always a source for good copy. "I believe in the gold standard," she said in the early Sixties. "I like solid lumps of things. You can always melt them down." She adored slouch hats of the type worn by Greta Garbo, and had a volatile temperament. Avedon commented Avedon, "When she got into movies, I joked that maybe she would do for the movies what she would never do for me – hold still."

Born Cecelia Anne Renee Parker in Long Island City, New York, in 1933, she was the daughter of the inventor George Parker, who told her, "Never let anyone call you Cecelia, you're my little Suzy." Her older sister was Dorian Leigh, a popular fashion model in the Forties.

When Parker was 14, her sister took her to see Eileen Ford, the doyenne of modelling agents, who considered the teenager, at five feet nine inches, too tall, though she later described Parker as "the most beautiful creature you can imagine. She was everybody's everything." The fashion editor Diana Vreeland was undeterred by Parker's height and promptly hired her.

It was a time, just after the Second World War, when fashion magazines were expanding their readership by appealing to more than just the higher reaches of society. The most popular models rapidly became superstars, and when Parker posed in one of the first bikini shots she caused a sensation. By the mid-Fifties she was the world's highest-paid cover girl, making $100,000 a year, though disarmingly describing herself as "an animated clothes hanger".

Edie Locke, former Editor-in-Chief of Mademoiselle magazine, said:

A lot of models are beautiful, but it takes a lot of make-up and this, that and the other to make them look fabulous. But all Suzy had to do was shake out that mane and she'd look fabulous.

Suzy Parker made her film début after Richard Avedon introduced her to the director Stanley Donen, who cast her in Funny Face (1957). Donen then asked 20th Century-Fox to test her for a leading role in his next film, Kiss Them for Me (also 1957), starring Cary Grant. In this Second World War comedy drama about three war heroes having a hedonistic break in San Francisco, Parker was a Nob Hill sophisticate who falls in love with the flyer Grant.

Parker had approached her new career with enthusiasm – "I can't take the fashion world seriously," she said. "I am going to bring sex back to Hollywood" – but critics found her performance cold and wooden.

The following year she reached her acting peak in Philip Dunne's moving version of John O'Hara's novel Ten North Frederick (1958). The story of an unhappily married ageing lawyer who finds late love with his daughter's college room-mate (Parker), her performance was lauded by The New York Times as neatly underplayed.

Her other films included The Best of Everything (1959) and Circle of Deception (1961), but her film career never took hold. Her co-star in the latter film was Bradford Dillman, who became her third and final husband – she had been married briefly at 17 to a high-school sweetheart ("It was either marry him or go to college. I didn't want to go to college") and in 1955 she married the French writer Pierre de la Salle, whom she later divorced.

Parker, who said she looked in the mirror each day and thanked God for her cheekbones, stated that she modelled only for the money. In the early Fifties she temporarily changed professions to become a photographer, studying with Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris before working for the French edition of Vogue. In 1958 her father was killed in a car crash in which she was seriously injured, but she recovered with no visible scars.

In the Sixties she was a popular guest on television shows, and she starred in a 1964 episode of The Twilight Zone, "Number Twelve Looks Just Like You", set in a world in which everyone is transformed at the age of 19 into an identical beauty. Parker played six roles as all the female adults seen during the episode. The producer, William Fong, said:

At that time Suzy Parker was the most famous model in the country. She wasn't much of an actress but she was gorgeous to look at. It was my notion, that if you were going to do a show about everybody looking as beautiful as possible, to use her.

In 1968 Parker and Dillman moved to Montecito to escape the celebrity life, and she raised six children there – her daughter from her second marriage, two of Dillman's from a previous marriage, and three they had together. Her stepdaughter Pamela Dillman Harmon said,

She acted through the still camera brilliantly, but when she acted in front of the moving camera she was not so free and comfortable and she said she wasn't the actress that she wanted to be. So she decided, "OK, I'm going to give up on this and devote my talents to being the best wife and mother", and she really was that.

Richard Avedon said,

Suzy Parker gave emotion and reality to the history of fashion photography. She invented the form and no one has surpassed her.

Tom Vallance