Empress Huyan (Zhaowu)

Colleen Corby (born 1947) was one of the world's first supermodels, years before the term was widely used. One of the most well known and beloved teen models of the Sixties, Colleen's modeling career began in 1959 when she was just eleven years old. Two weeks after walking into Eileen Ford's modeling agency (ostensibly to look for a summer job) Colleen was sent on her first modeling assignment. That "summer job" would last for the next twenty years. Colleen's career took off right from the start. By the end of that first summer her assignments were coming so steadily that her parents enrolled her in Manhattan's Professional Children's School, which allows for the irregular schedules of actors and models. By her last year of High School she was so busy she hardly ever attended classes.

Colleen in the 1960s

By the mid-1960s Colleen's popularity was at its highest. In 1963, she signed a multi-year movie contract with Universal Pictures, and had every intention of making acting her new career. But despite her best efforts, her acting career never got off the ground. Her popularity as a model, however, was still strong. Her face was everywhere in the 1960s, in T.V. commercials, in magazines, in catalogs. Articles were written about her in the teen magazines of the day. Colleen was most closely associated with one magazine in particular - Seventeen magazine. She was probably Seventeen's most popular editorial model ever, appearing on an unprecedented 15 covers in the 1960s (five times in 1964 alone) and in the magazine's fashion spreads almost ever month.

1970s Career

By the 1970s Colleen's teen market was gone, but she continued to appear in magazines like Glamour and Mademoiselle and was a fixture in the catalogs of major retailers like Sears and JCPenney. She initially retired from modeling in 1979, when she married businessman Peter Bernuth. She briefly return to modeling in the early Eighties, but after her husband moved his business to Florida, Colleen left New York and the fashion world for good. Her last public appearance was on The Oprah Winfrey Show in the year 2000 with four other supermodels from the 1960's. (Oprah praised her as her favorite model and the one she most closely identified with as a teen.)

Colleen_Corby_(Teen_Cover_-_Dec_1964).jpg

                      Colleen Corby on the cover of Teen magazine, December 1964.

External links

* Colleen's 1st Fansite