We signed up my little girl to a modelling agency. This week she was doing a TV commercial for Aldi. She’s done JD, Next, Speedos. She enjoys it.
I started modelling when I was 13, so I learned a lot of things. I actually love doing make-up on other people, too.
In judging of a beautiful statue, the aesthetic faculty is absolutely and completely gratified by the splendid curves of those marble lips that are dumb to our complaint, the noble modelling of those limbs that are powerless to help us.
I think it’s always been understood that Canada is not a country that’s going to stand up and beat its chest on the world stage, but we can be very helpful in modelling solutions that work.
I started modelling while still studying. I liked doing television commercials and being in front of the camera. Lots of ad directors told me to try for films.
There are loads of actresses that modelled. They just weren’t famous. There weren’t a lot that were really known as models that became actresses, but there are hordes of them that did modelling before such as Anjelica Huston, Jessica Lange, Sharon Stone, Demi Moore and Geena Davis. There are loads of ’em.
As a means to an end, modelling was good, but I had to distance myself from it when I started working as an actress, because even though I wasn’t high-profile, I found in my first write-ups that I’d be referred to as ‘model Gemma Chan.’
I have never planned my career. I never wanted to be an actress. Films were an instinctive step, just like modelling and television.
Right after college, I participated in the Miss India contest and then went on to pursue modelling, as that seemed like the logical next step. But pretty soon, I started to feel stagnant in that profession.
I feel less pressure to dress for the eyes of other people now. I think that happened once I started modelling, near the end of high school.
My memories of the whirlwind ’90s are a blur of work schedules. I was completing my B. Com. degree in 1991 when I took to modelling and acting in TV serials. A year later, I found my foothold in movies.
My dad is from the army, and so we studied all over. I had done an Onida campaign at the age of two, as my mom always had this inclination for me to model, but my dad was clear that I could model only when I turned 18, so immediately after school, I started modelling.
Modelling was never in my plan. Never.
I’m a poet first and foremost, before the modelling.
In modelling, it’s very hard to keep in touch with the people you knew when you started.
To be on a sound footing, one must have one’s perceptions of life clear, and a strong foundation. That is all that ultimately matters, not only in modelling, but in other professions as well.
With modelling, a lot happens behind the scenes; all the fittings and hair and makeup. Then the runway takes two minutes – you just walk out and come back in!
You can call me a Mumbai girl since I have spent the first ten years of my life here. Then I shifted to Goa, where I got my first modelling break.
I actually started modelling when I was about eight years old, and then, when I went to high school, I stopped to concentrate on schoolwork because I was in an accelerated program, so it was just really time for me to sit down and focus on my studies.
Even when I was modelling, I never had a mom sitting on my head and a bunch of people waiting on me. I’ve always been independent. I’ll do my thing and go.
I’ve never been interested in a career in modelling, I was interested in my independence. When I was in school, modelling was what I needed to reach independence without having to leave.
What I like about modelling is that it has given me that opportunity to travel and experience different cultures, work with creative people, and now it’s given me a voice, and with that voice hopefully I can do good things with it.
I’m trying to work on my modelling career and remove myself from the whole FHM stigma. I want to be seen as a classic model.
When I was at school I wanted to be a writer and an actress. Then this whole modelling thing happened.
I think in terms of me shying away from modelling, I would like to clarify in some way that I was taking a break from many things in my life and obviously what people in the public see is that I’m pulling away from what is more public.
Modelling wasn’t a passion of mine, so that made it get old kind of quickly. I was getting very frustrated.
I was acting before I was modelling, when I was very young, doing the Edinburgh Festival and that sort of stuff.
I never really thought about modelling. It wasn’t something I ever wanted to do. I used to always be so angry about modelling.
Mum left school at 15, and after a few years of modelling and dating jazz musicians, was married by 21 to my father, Mike Taylor, a journalist on the ‘Daily Mirror.’ They had my brother and me pretty quickly and had split up by the time I was two. I don’t really have any memories of them as a couple.
It is so common in middle-class families to consider modelling and acting not serious.
And then modelling, because it pays you really well and you get to travel, I was forced to get used to the idea of standing in front of a camera and having six or seven people watching me and that actually allowed me to loosen up from an acting point of view.
I think modelling was like the university of life, really. You get to travel but you get thrown into this adult world, which is kind of quite scary.
While I was in college, I was intrigued by modelling and also won the best model award in my college.
I’m trying to work on my modelling career and remove myself from the whole FHM stigma.
When you are modelling, you are creating a picture, a still life, perhaps something like a silent film. You convey emotion but you are only using your body.
I think because I did a lot of modelling and appeared in lads mags a lot of women didn’t necessarily warm to me. But now I have been through childbirth, post-natal depression and struggled with my weight, women seem to relate to me a lot more.
In teaching, I wanted to offer a general pharmacology course based on chemical principles, biochemical classification and mathematical modelling. In the event I achieved neither of my ambitions.
People see my modelling and see me getting papped all the time and don’t really get to see me because I don’t do much TV or whatever.
I remember, when I was modelling in Japan, the agency would tell us that some guy wanted to take all the girls out to dinner, and I would be the one girl who didn’t go – I didn’t want to go out with a stranger.
Business analytics or predictive modelling is a $100 billion industry, and $41 billion is spent on outsourced business analytics every year. I think that’s about twice the size of the movie industry – it’s really big.
Modelling, for me, I find that it’s like acting.
Aside from my modelling, by the early Nineties I was also starting to work as a photographer, which I loved.
When I was young, I used to tell my mum that she had to get me on the TV, but then modelling just sort of happened.
When I began modelling I was completely unprepared for the onslaught of curiosity it carried with it.
At the end of the day, my legacy will not be modelling but my cosmetics line.
Modelling isn’t something I’m doing to prove people wrong. It’s something I’m doing because it’s what I want to do.
I’ve been to Chennai several times for modelling shows and shooting ad films. It’s a great place to come back to because the people are warm and welcoming. I’ve never had the opportunity to actually see the city, but whatever places I’ve been to have really caught my attention.
Sometimes, if I see a picture and I can make it a bit better, then I will, like everyone else does. I’ve been Photoshopped in every picture since I started modelling.
When I first started modelling, as I was walking down the catwalk I just thought, ‘Please don’t fall over, please don’t fall over, please don’t fall over!’
I went to a hotel to become a chef and then tried becoming a flight attendant, but no one took me. I then worked in a travel agency and got into advertising and modelling after someone spotted me. So I started doing ads. I did ‘Charminar’ ad, because of which I got two films.
I tried for modelling work but it was a bit slow and that’s when I took a part-time job at McDonalds. It gave me income while I was waiting for my big break and at the very least I could eat.
Computer modelling for weather forecasting, and indeed for climate forecasting, has reached its limits.
When I began modelling in my late teens, I started to earn a lot of money very, very quickly, but I’d never been shown how to manage it properly.
Sexy in India is not considered positive. But, with today’s crop of fresh faces in the modelling arena, being sexy is an asset.
Ever since school, I got a lot of attention as I was modelling and everyone knew who I was. As a child, you enjoy it. But one has to explore and doing things by oneself to learn that life is very large.
I’d always really wanted to act; but the modelling contracts came more easily.
I started learning dancing when I was three years old, and I started modelling when I was eleven years old.
