Women loved that I was always smiling — I only smiled because I was rubbish at pouting, says Linda Lusardi
BEFORE there were reality TV stars, Wags and social media stars, Page 3 girls became household names.
This week, 50 years on from the launch of the most famous page in newspapers on November 17, 1970, we are looking back at the national phenomenon.
To mark the anniversary some of our most famed pin-ups remember their years in The Sun. We begin with model-turned-actress Linda Lusardi, 62 – voted most popular Page 3 girl of all time.
HER natural curls and winning smile made Linda Lusardi a standout Page 3 girl – but it was a shower of rain that launched her career.
While taking a break from her job at a tax office in 1979, Linda was talent-spotted.
She said: “I was on my lunch hour and a photographer’s wife stopped me in the street and asked what agency I was with and I told her I wasn’t.
“I was sent along for a shoot with Sun Page 3 photographer Beverley Goodway.
“Apparently, the picture editor didn’t go for that first shoot.
“Beverley rang and asked me to go in for another session, because he believed I had something.
“I had straight hair in that first picture. At the time my sister and I used to straighten our hair on an ironing board with a sheet of brown paper over it.
“On the way to the second shoot I got caught in the rain and my hair went curly. When I arrived I was really upset and said, ‘I need to straighten my hair!’ He said, ‘No leave it like that’.
“When he sent the pictures in, the picture editor went mad for them and said, ‘Who is this girl?’ ”
Linda went on to feature on the famous page for an astonishing ten years before retiring to begin her career as an actress.
Little wonder she topped a 2005 poll as The Sun readers’ all-time favourite.
Linda said: “I had an absolute ball. I look back and remember them as great years. In the end I stopped because my acting was taking off, but it was Page 3 that put me on the map.”
HEALTHY LOOKING
Linda, who grew up in Palmers Green, North London, was on a crowded train on the way to work when she realised the shot of her with her beautiful natural waves had made it into The Sun.
At the time, Page 3 pin-ups such as her ranked among Britain’s most photographed women and enjoyed huge fame.
She said: “I opened the paper and there I was. I thought, ‘Everyone on the carriage is going to know it is me!’ But, of course, they didn’t. I went into the tax office for the last time that morning then never went back.”
Linda quickly became a firm favourite with readers.
She said: “Women would often tell me I was their favourite because I always used to smile.
“I was just never any good at pouting.”
And Linda told how, for her, Page 3 always celebrated natural beauty.
She said: “In those days there were no Instagram filters or retouching. If we happened to have a spot one day, or a little bit of fat above your bikini bottoms, it went in the paper.
“The girls were all shapes and sizes and in my era, not particularly big boobed. They were always rounded and healthy looking. I never went on a diet or felt pressured to, it never entered my head.
“Of course, you always had insecurities and I thought the other girls were much more gorgeous than me. I always thought I was too short and my legs too fat, hair too fuzzy. Now I look at the pictures and realise how daft I was, I would give my back teeth to look like that now.”
Linda said her beloved dad Nello, who she lost to Alzheimer’s three years ago, couldn’t have been prouder of her achievements.
She said: “He worked on building sites and he loved people saying they had seen his daughter in the paper. When he died we found he had kept clippings from everything I had been in. It filled a wardrobe.”
Linda threw herself into the whirlwind life, enjoying nights out at celebrity hotspots.
She said: “We did enjoy ourselves and make the most of the parties. I was out three times a week at nightclubs. When I was voted Page 3 girl of the year once I remember I hired the whole of Stringfellows.
“I was once there on my birthday and Peter Stringfellow got me a massive cake. I ended up having a cake fight with my best friend and fellow Page 3 model Angie Layne. The pictures were all over the papers the next day.
“We all used to go out as a big group of girls and it was great fun. I had a sports car and enjoyed the lifestyle. I left school with very few qualifications and I could never have earned the kind of money I did then without Page 3.
“I was flying all over the world, to places like the Maldives, Florida and Jamaica, doing calendar shoots, opening shops and nightclubs. It was a great life.
SACKFULS OF FAN MAIL
“By 21 I had bought and built my own house from scratch.”
Linda told how her time on Page 3 never drew any negativity and she would receive sackfuls of fan mail that her mum, Lilian, would help answer.
She said: “I genuinely believe it was a more innocent time, there was no Twitter or trolling. People would never say sleazy things to me in public, only positive.
“In fact, the only times I felt like I had to defend myself was from MPs who said Page 3 should be banned.”
Linda publicly debated with Labour MPs Clare Short and Ken Livingstone on the issue of Page 3, a move that unexpectedly led to her acting career.
She said: “I was spotted and I think they realised I could string a sentence together so I started getting offered work.”
Linda has since appeared in soaps Brookside and Emmerdale, as well as police drama The Bill and in film and theatre. She also became a panto stalwart and met her husband, actor Sam Kane, 51, when she was starring as Snow White and he was the Prince, in panto in Darlington in 1994.
The couple were struck down with Covid-19 this year, both ending up in hospital.
She said: “I suffered quite badly with the effects but am feeling better and better each month.”
Linda has also been filming the latest ITV1 Full Monty special, which will again see her strip off for the cameras more than 30 years since retiring from Page 3.
This year sees celebrities including Dame Jenni Murray, rugby player Gareth Thomas and actor Jamie Lomas bare all during an ice-dancing routine to raise awareness of intimate cancers.
Linda told how it was the memory of her Page 3 pal Angie Layne that gave her the courage to take part. She said: “Angie and I were really close and remained friends throughout our lives.
“She was just 31 when she died of breast cancer in 1991. It was devastating and I am doing it for her.”
NO REGRETS
Linda and Sam have two children — Jack, 21 and Lucy, 24, who have both followed their parents into showbusiness.
Jack has carved out a successful acting career, appearing in movie Dragonheart this year, while Lucy is a singer who appeared on The Voice in 2017 and has a single, Christmas Without You, coming out this month.
She said: “Lucy looks at my Page 3 pictures, which are black and white, almost how you might look at wartime pictures. It seems like another time to her. But she says she is proud of me and that I look fantastic.
“I think The Sun did the right thing stopping it when it did, because it is a different age now and doesn’t fit with current times.
“Back in the days when I was modelling for Page 3, showing your boobs somehow didn’t seem like such a big deal. You would go on holiday and see everyone sunbathing topless.
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“Page 3 was a phenomenon in its day and something of an institution. We were on people’s breakfast tables every day.
“I look back on it all with a great deal of nostalgia and no regrets.”
How it bare-all began
ON a wet Sunday afternoon 50 years ago, the Sun’s Page 3 girl was born – almost by accident.
Looking for a picture to mark the first anniversary of the paper’s re-launch as a tabloid, art editor Vic Giles spotted a photo of a girl in her birthday suit and put her on Page 3.
In the black and white shot, art student Stefanie Khan, 20, pictured, sits sideways and topless with the sun on her back, her face turned to the camera.
It was the perfect antidote to the dark days Britain was facing with strikes, economic strife and bad weather.
That picture, published on Monday November 17, 1970, launched an institution loved by millions of readers and hated by a noisy minority, often with a political agenda.
For 50 years The Sun’s Page 3 girls, with their wholesome looks and winning smiles, became household names – except for Stefanie. An error in the excitement of producing our birthday edition meant the name of the first-ever topless Page 3 girl was misspelt. As each anniversary came round, all attempts to find “Stephanie Rahn” failed.
Remarkably, she appeared 83 times in The Sun as a Page 3 girl from 1973 to 1978 but no one recognised she was the one in that very first picture because by then she was using her mother’s surname and was known as Stefanie Marrian.
Even glamour photographer Beverley Goodway, who took most of The Sun’s Page 3 girl pictures, didn’t realise who she was. Named after the Yorkshire town his gran came from, Beverley was a happily married man who the girls came to trust like a father. Shy and modest, bow tie-wearing Beverley looked like a headmaster and because of his name many new models thought they were due to be photographed by a woman.
But the first thing the newbies saw in his studio under a railway arch off Fleet Street was a photo of Beverley with his wife and two daughters, so they felt reassured.
Page 3 became so popular that Beverley was deluged with photos of girls who wanted to appear – one he rejected in 1991 being Geri Halliwell.
Beverley, who spent 63,000 hours in the studio during a 33-year career, recalled: “The failure rate was high. The boobs had to be good but they were almost incidental. It was the face that mattered.”
Over 50 years, Page 3 girls have been more than just pretty faces. In April 2008, Zoe McConnell, who quit college to be a topless star, led a Sun team of glamour girls in a debate at Oxford University: “This House believes Page 3 is unacceptable in the 21st century.”
The girls – including Peta Todd, Sam Cooke, Becky Rule, Mel Boorman and Ruth Reynolds – won easily by 230 votes to 129. They defeated a team that included TV pundit Libby Purves, who said later: Never mind the ayes and noes – the legs won it.”
Page 3 came to an end on Thursday, January 22, 2015, with Nicola, 22, from Bournemouth, in an eye-catching pose.
First-ever Page 3 girl Stefanie, now 70, and living in London, says: “Being on Page 3 opened doors.
“I loved the people, the newspaper and what it did for my career.”
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