Coleen Corby

[Nefertiti]

Colleen Corby (Born August 3, 1947) was one of the most well known and beloved teen models of the 1960s. 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.

By the mid-1960s, Colleen's popularity was at its peak. 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 TV 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 every month.

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. Colleen briefly returned to modeling in the early 1980s, but after her second child was born she left New York and the fashion world for good. She currently lives in Florida (where her husband's business was located). Her last public appearance was on The Oprah Winfrey Show with four other supermodels from the 1960s. (Oprah praised her as her favorite model during her teen years and the one she most closely identified with at that time.

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