Twiggy Turns 77, and Her Documentary Finally Reaches the U.S. This Week

• Twiggy turned 77 on Sept. 19. She was born Lesley Hornby in London in 1949 and is a Dame today.
• Sadie Frost’s documentary about her reaches U.S. on-demand platforms and DVD on Sept. 22.
• British audiences saw it in cinemas on March 7, 2025. The Atlantic crossing took more than 18 months.

She was 16 when it happened. A hairdresser cut her hair short, a photographer shot the result, and the Daily Express put the pictures in the paper under a label that stuck for sixty years: the Face of 1966.

Twiggy turns 77 today, and the timing is not an accident. Three days from now her documentary finally opens in the United States.

Who is Twiggy?

Dame Lesley Lawson, born Lesley Hornby in London on Sept. 19, 1949. The nickname came from how thin she was as a teenager, and it outlived every other name she has had.

The modelling ran roughly four years. What made her different was not the clothes but the face: cropped hair, enormous eyes and lower lashes she painted on herself, at a moment when the industry standard was a grown woman in couture.

The second career turned out to be the longer one. Ken Russell cast her in The Boy Friend in 1971 and she won two Golden Globes for it. Broadway came later: a Tony nomination for My One and Only, which ran from 1983 to 1984.

What is the documentary about?

Twiggy is the second documentary directed by Sadie Frost, the actress and producer. It runs 1 hour 38 minutes and works the way most legacy documentaries do — archive cut against people who were there.

The people who were there include Paul McCartney, Dustin Hoffman, Brooke Shields, Joanna Lumley, Lulu, Pattie Boyd, Erin O’Connor, Zandra Rhodes, Stella McCartney and Poppy Delevingne. Her husband, the actor Leigh Lawson, appears too.

Hoffman is a familiar name around here for other reasons — Matthew Rhys recently described being snubbed by him backstage in 2000.

Where can you watch it?

From Sept. 22, on video-on-demand platforms and on DVD in North America, through Cleopatra Entertainment. There are also one-off screenings in New York and Los Angeles, timed to land just after New York Fashion Week.

That is the whole American release: no wide theatrical run, no streaming-service exclusive. You rent it.

Why did it take 18 months to cross the Atlantic?

Because nobody bought it for a year. The film played British cinemas on March 7, 2025, with the BBC and Studio Soho among the names on it. North American rights did not close until June 2026, and they went to a specialist label rather than a major.

What that sequence shows is narrow but real: the film was finished, reviewed and in cinemas in one market for a full year while it sat unsold in the other. When the deal finally came, it came for rental rather than for screens.

Is she still working?

Yes, and she has been on this side of the business for decades: fronting Marks & Spencer campaigns, designing a glasses range for Specsavers, and sitting as a judge on America’s Next Top Model.

She was made a Dame in the 2019 New Year Honours, for services to fashion, to the arts and to charity, and collected it at Buckingham Palace at 69.

More in Style, and elsewhere this week: what Netflix invented in its Lizzie Borden season, the Seyfried split, and the horror reboot that just took the box office.

— Bruno Monteiro

Sources: birth date, honours and career credits from published biographical records; documentary runtime, participants and UK release date from Studio Soho International and the official Studio Soho Distribution trailer; North American distribution deal as reported by Deadline in June 2026; U.S. release date and format from Cleopatra Entertainment.