Dorian Leigh, who died on 7 July, 2008, aged 91, was considered by many to be the very first supermodel.

Her distinctive looks, vivacious allure and sparkling personality made her one of the most photographed woman of her era and the first model to truly enter the public's conscious as a celebrity.

The 'Fire and Ice' campaign for Revlon's 1950s range of lipstick and nail varnish put her on billboards across the world and characterised her as object of both empowerment and sexuality, alongside the slogan, "For you who love to flirt with fire ... who dare to skate on thin ice".

She was known throughout the industry for being adaptable, versatile, thoroughly professional and - perhaps incongruously for a supermodel - humble. Her reward was earnings estimated at the height of her career to be more than a dollar a minute, a place on the cover of more than 50 high profile magazines and a prominent place in the popular culture of the age.

Dorian Elizabeth Leigh Parker was born on 23 April, 1917, in San Antonio, Texas.

Some years later, in 1933, her sister Suzy Parker was born and went onto to become the face of 1950s.

Again incongruously for a supermodel, Dorian's first career was as a university-educated aircraft engineer and it was only in 1944, after being discovered by the agent Harry Conover, that she became a model - he instructed her to go to the offices of Harper's Bazaar magazine and pass herself off as 19, even though she was 27.

The next morning she did her first shoot and was put straight on the front cover, the first of many such engagements. At the time, modelling for photography was considering more prestigious and respectable than the catwalks and it was also better paid. Ms Leigh's high cheek bones and arched eyebrows set her apart from her rivals and she seemed perfectly designed to wear the sleek lines and luxuriant colours favoured by designers in the 1940s and ' 50s.

Her success as a model elevated her into the upper echelons of American show business society and she was frequently photographed living it up with the great and good of Hollywood and Broadway. She was reputedly her friend Truman Capote's inspiration for the character Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's and another Audrey Hepburn film, the musical Funny Face, was loosely based on her career.

More public intrigue was created by her string of marriages (four in total) and reputation as an outrageous flirt, an image that only heightened the success of her risqué campaigns for Revlon where she was photographed in devilish red. Her earnings reached $300,000-a-year at one point, but she was also frequently broke due to the tardiness with which the fashion world was wont to pay its bills.

Her sister was the model and actress Suzy Parker who was arguably the more successful of the two in later years, despite only being hired to the Harry Conover Agency at Ms Leigh's insistence in her original contract negotiations. Ms Leigh opened an agency herself in the 1960s and went on to further diversify her life's work by becoming a chef and opening a catering firm. She also acted in two feature films at the height of her fame, wrote poetry and cookery books, and published an autobiography called The Girl Who Had Everything in 1981.

She had five children from her four marriages, as well as a son out of wedlock who committed suicide at 21 and to whom her memoirs were dedicated. She suffered with Alzheimer's disease in later years and died at a nursing home in Falls Church, Virginia.