biography
Referred to tellingly as "The Body" in her native Australia, Elle Macpherson's formidable six-foot frame has graced enough covers of Sports Illustrated to make the auburn-haired model-turned-actress synonymous with the words "Swimsuit Issue." Despite a youthful passion for ballet, Macpherson claims she was a classic tree-climbing tomboy as a young girl growing up Down Under. The eldest of four children of a well-off Sydney family, she witnessed her parents divorce at fourteen (born Eleanor Gow, Elle adopted the surname of Macpherson when her mother remarried soon after). Macpherson enrolled in Sydney University's pre-law program (no doubt on the encouragement of her barrister stepfather), but her future in law was cut short after a single year of study when she discovered she had a ready talent for promoting an athletic-yet-voluptuous new standard for print models. A career in modeling had never even crossed her mind before the leggy eighteen-year-old was "discovered" while vacationing in Aspen, Colorado, and was promptly signed to the Click modeling agency.
Before too long, the young Aussie became a mainstay at Elle magazine, the pages of which she graced monthly for six years. Macpherson consolidated her staying power at the publication by marrying the magazine's creative director, Gilles Bensimon, twenty years her senior, at the age of twenty-one. Three consecutive years fronting the cover of Sports Illustrated's swimsuit issue and producing a series of exercise videos for the publication proved that Macpherson was equally appealing to the male magazine-buying demographic. Eventually, Macpherson earned the illustrious title of "supermodel," entering the then-elite pantheon of universally familiar models Christie Brinkley, Paulina Porizkova, and Cindy Crawford. All the hoopla surrounding her gangbuster modeling career attracted the attention of the ever-vigilant Australian tourism commission. Recognizing in the supermodel a lucrative, and far more fetching, companion emblem of life Down Under to Paul "Crocodile Dundee" Hogan, the commission offered Macpherson a position as a promoter of tourism in Western Australia.
Like countless women who have made a name for themselves by posing for cameras and strutting down runways, Macpherson inevitably turned her attention to acting. Woody Allen handpicked the neophyte actress to walk past the camera in a less-than-challenging party scene in his 1990 film Alice. The fleeting fly-by led to a relatively more substantial role--one that required Macpherson to emote as well as look beautiful for the cameras--in 1994's Sirens. In preparation for her appearance in the pre-World War II drama, Macpherson claims that she gained more than twenty pounds to give her character--a scantily clad, beach-dwelling muse of a freethinking artist--an era-appropriate roundness. Her fattening-up was rewarded with modest critical notice.
Macpherson has since managed to evade typecasting as merely a shapely and innocuous layabout, by appearing as a spoiled debutante in Franco Zeffirelli's 1996 remake of the gothic romance Jane Eyre, and as the object of Ben Stiller's affection in the romantic comedy If Lucy Fell. She also landed the pivotal, if small, part of the woman who dumps Jeff Bridges and leaves Barbra Streisand in prime position to pick up the pieces in The Mirror Has Two Faces. The up-and-coming big-screen star, who was quoted post-Alice as saying, "I think that acting doesn't always follow modeling, and it's a mistake a lot of models make," has since amended her former position, and recently declared, "For fifteen years, I've been playing the same character--which is myself--and I'm bored with 'myself.' Acting is an enormous release for me creatively and emotionally." In possession of a "multi-tier" contract with Miramax that promises plenty of film, television, video, and publishing opportunities, the newly enthusiastic thespian is poised to become a familiar face in multiple entertainment formats.
Aware that both modeling and acting gigs for women tend to diminish rapidly as they age, Macpherson has taken measures to extend her financial solvency well into the future. The former Victoria's Secret model is chair of the Australia-based lingerie label Elle Macpherson Intimates, which she has groomed into a $10 million enterprise. Wading deeper into the business end of the fashion industry, Macpherson also lent her name to a line of sportswear and "fun/youth-oriented intimate apparel" for Montgomery Ward. In between acting classes and physique maintenance, she further expressed her entrepreneurial bent by founding the burgeoning Fashion CafT chain of concept fantasy eateries, sharing the responsibilities and rewards of restaurant ownership with fellow models Claudia Schiffer, Christy Turlington, and Naomi Campbell. As glamour-starved tourists dine on "Elle's Shrimp on the Barbe" and "Naomi's Fish and Chips" at the flagship New York location, new outposts are mushrooming Planet Hollywood-style throughout Asia and Europe. Apart from the demands of being a successful restaurateur, the statuesque actress had roles in two of 1997's bigger-budgeted cinematic affairs: Joel Schumacher's Batman & Robin, in which she played Batman's love interest; and Lee Tamahori's The Edge, in which she played the love interest of both Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin. Macpherson added "mother" to her list of credits, when her first child arrived en scFne in February of 1998.
