Loathe your legs, ladies? You’re in great company
As Helen Mirren parades her less than perfect pins, ex-model SANDRA HOWARD — who hates hers, too — sympathises
Good l egs are the measure of elegance in a woman. If you’ve got the kind of legs that look as fabulous in a pair of shorts on holiday as they do in a cocktail dress, you’re set for life.
Men will fall at your feet, doors will open for you, and you’ll never have any trouble looking good on the red carpet, should the occasion arise.
Sadly, none of the above applies to me.
My legs are my very worst feature. Knobbly knees, chunky ankles, skin that’s growing more veined and mottled by the day. They’re the absolute bane of my life. And they always have been.
Ever since I was a model in the Sixties and Seventies, I have envied women with perfect pins. I used to watch them strutting along the catwalk and parading around photoshoots l ooking like giraffes with their long, graceful stride.
There I’d be, shying behind them, hiding my stubby legs in trousers.
Even when I was featured on the cover of Vogue, I remember looking at the image and feeling a pang of disappointment — why did my l egs l ook so utterly terrible? I dreamed of having a set of pins that men drooled over, but my sturdy pair simply didn’t have that allure.
So, I couldn’t have been more gratified to see Helen Mirren, the style icon of older women everywhere — and I imagine not an insignificant number of men — showing off legs that were, shall we say, less than perfect on an American TV chat show earlier this week.
The 6 9 - ye a r- o l d actress appeared on Late Night With Seth Meyers, looking every inch the sexagenarian glamourpuss in a striped knee-length skirt and grey satin jacket with a statement collar.
Her ice-blonde hair was beautifully coiffed and her make-up immaculate, but the stunning effect tapered off as the camera panned down. For once it wasn’t Helen’s beauty that caught the eye — sadly, it was her somewhat disappointing legs.
Helen rarely shows off her legs, and now I can see why. Though her thighs were modestly covered by the skirt, it was hard not to gawp at what emerged from beneath the hem.
Her knees were bony, her calves chunky and her ankles had a touch of the — dare I say it — dreaded ‘cankle’ (when the ankle seems as wide as the calf).
I am sure I speak for so many other women when I say that I adore Helen Mirren and how she stands up for mature glamour. But I took great comfort in seeing that at least one, tiny, part of her isn’t as flawless as the rest. I’m relieved I’m not the only one to lack a set of finely turned ankles.
Every woman has parts of her body that she hates and my horror spot has always been the same. Though I am tall — 5ft 8in — most of my height comes from my t orso, which is r ather long, whereas my legs are far stubbier and shorter than you would expect.
When I started modelling, in my late teens, I realised how troublesome my lower legs were. I’d see them i n photos and wonder how they’d managed to make them look so big and ugly. on bad days, I couldn’t bear to look at them.
I didn’t get to choose the clothes I wore for shoots, so I’d jump for joy when they put me in trousers — and when I had to wear a skirt, I learned to stand with one leg behind the other, which I found to be more flattering. Photographs from the waist up were the best.
Still, today, when someone is taking a snap of me at a family do, I’ll beg them to come closer and miss out the legs. once, in 1965, Women’s Realm magazine flew me to Kenya for a bathing suit shoot with another British model. The photographer knew I was self- conscious about my legs, so we started doing the pictures in the sea.
We did a few shots dipping our toes in the water, and by the end we were standing in the water up to our knees. our lower legs didn’t show in a single shot — it was wonderful!
I have spent a lot of time examining my legs in the mirror, front and back, and trying to figure out exactly what it is about them that I dislike. My ankles aren’t the thinnest and my knees are lumpy and bumpy.
As I get older, the skin on my calves is developing veins and dark patches. But it’s hard to pick out one thing — I think it’s the whole package I dislike.
In the fashion world, a model’s legs can make or break her reputation. Women like Jane Fonda, Iman, Gisele and Heidi Klum are all known for their long, beautiful pins.
others, like me, have had to
I dreamed of a set of pins men drooled over When I had to model trousers, I jumped for joy
rely on other body parts — such as a good upper body and a nice smile — to get ahead.
When I left modelling in my 30s, it was great because I could finally choose what I wore — and the legs went back under wraps.
I have always been more comfortable slobbing around in jeans or trousers than dresses. Skinny jeans are perfect, especially the ones with a bit of stretch in them, as you can get the illusion of a good leg if you don’t have one.
These days, I try to avoid calflength dresses, as they draw attention to my lower leg. I think Helen was quite brave to wear a knee-length skirt — they can be the worst. Something slightly more tailored, falling just below the knee, would have been far more flattering.
Shoes, too, are a challenge for women who have issues with their legs. I find a good midheight heel — something from LK Bennett or Emma Hope — is the best.
They’re incredibly hard to find, as most are too low (making legs look stumpy) or too high (tottering never looks good), so when I do get my hands on a good pair, I buy two and wear them to death. You can really depend on a good shoe to be kind to the leg.
Now, at 75, I still brave bare legs in summer. If the heatwave continues, I might even consider getting them out in April — that really would be a record for me.
As I’ve aged, my legs don’t tan as well, so I slather on some selftan to help bring a bit of colour to them. A good brown skin tone hides all the little spots and blemishes that I despise.
Keeping your feet in good shape helps, too. I always paint my toenails bright orange — in fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Helen was wearing something similar under her sophisticated grey suede heels. It keeps me feeling young and is a welcome distraction away from the rest of the leg.
Airline socks — the thin, elasticated kind that help prevent swelling and deep vein thrombosis during a long flight — have been a saviour in my later years. I put a pair on if I have to spend a day at my desk: it stops my legs swelling up in the heat and keeps circulation going smoothly.
My husband, Michael, can’t understand my problem with my legs. He says they’re just lovely for a woman of my age. And many men may think the same about Helen Mirren’s.
She has always been confident i n her appearance, and I’m sure she’s not worried in the slightest that her legs — in her own memorable words — ‘ look like Gazza’s’.
Good for her. And now at least I know that she’s not completely perfect.
So, Helen, I’m delighted that my less-than-lovely legs are in such good company. Next time I see you looking like a bombshell half your age in a sexy red bikini, maybe I won’t feel quite so insecure.
Helen once said her legs ‘look like Gazza’s’
‘She’s tall, elegant and the spitting image of Diana’ Kate arranged to meet her in New York, it’s claimed
THIS weekend, the nation is poised to celebrate the birth of a new royal baby. The Duchess of Cambridge, having already provided us with the heir — a bonny future king in the person of Prince George — is about to complete her dynastic duty by delivering ‘the spare’.
Under the terms of the Succession to the Crown Act 2013, which now allows females the same priority in the order of succession as males, the new baby, even if it is a girl — as William and Kate are rumoured to be hoping — will be fourth in line to the throne, after Charles, William and George, and will maintain that position regardless of the birth of future sons to the Cambridges.
But is this really the case? Certainly not if you pay attention to sensational and scandalous claims that have been circulating in the U.S., and are now making headlines in Spain and other parts of Europe.
Prepare to suspend your disbelief for a moment. For it is alleged that Prince William was not his mother’s first child: that he has a ‘secret sister’, now 33, called Sarah and living incognito in a small New England town in the United States.
How, you may well wonder, can this possibly be true when William was born in June 1982, only 11 months after his parents’ marriage?
The answer, according to this unbelievable claim, is that in December 1980, Lady Diana Spencer, then a 19-year-old virgin, was ordered by the Queen to undergo gynaecological tests to establish that she was capable of bearing children before her engagement to the heir to the throne could be announced.
During these tests, so the story goes, Diana’s eggs were harvested and fertilised with Prince Charles’s sperm. The tests proved successful, and the engagement of Charles and Diana was duly announced. Charles, asked if they were in love, responded with his famously cynical observation, ‘Whatever in love means’ — and the embryos were ordered to be destroyed.
But one of the team who examined Diana, a ‘rogue doctor’, secretly held one of the embryos back and implanted it in his own wife. Unknown to her, she became the surrogate mother of the biological child of Charles and Diana.
The baby, a girl, was born in October 1981, ten weeks after Charles and Diana’s fairy- tale wedding on July 29 of that year, and eight months before William’s own birth on June 21, 1982, in the Lindo Wing of St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, where fans are already camping out to catch the first glimpse of Kate and William emerging with their new baby.
There’s more. Sarah is reported as claiming that as she was growing up, she was always being told that she was ‘a dead ringer’ for Diana. Then, in her late 20s, her parents were both killed in a car accident. After their deaths, she came across a diary which revealed that she was the product of a donated embryo and of in vitro fertilisation (IVF), which was still in its infancy in the early 1980s.
Sarah says that she attempted to trace the origin of the donated embryo to find out who she really was. But about two years ago, a menacing message was left on her answerphone, warning her to stop looking if she valued her life.
Terrified by the thought that her life might be in danger, and haunted by suggestions that Diana’s death in Paris was not an accident but murder, she emigrated to America, where she now lives under a secret identity.
This is the extraordinary account that we are being asked to believe. Far-fetched though it sounds, could there be any truth in it?
As with all conspiracy theories — particularly those relating to Princess Diana’s death — there is always a narrow basis in fact. On her own admission, Diana did undergo a gynaecological examination before her engagement to Charles.
‘I had to be checked out before they would let me marry him,’ she told a close friend, Elsa, Lady Bowker, who was also a friend of mine.
The examination was almost certainly carried out by the late Sir George Pinker, the Queen’s highly respected surgeon-gynaecologist. Understandably, i ts purpose was t o confirm that there was no malformation of the womb or uterus, or anything that might preclude normal child-bearing.
That such an examination would ever have gone to the extreme of harvesting eggs and in vitro fertilisation seems incredible, though one cannot state as a fact that such a procedure did not take place.
The whole story of the secret baby began as fiction — which is perhaps where it ought to have remained. In 2011, a former New York businesswoman, Nancy E. Ryan, l i ving in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, selfpublished a novel entitled The Disappearance Of Olivia.
Mrs Ryan, who never met Princess Diana, had been fascinated by the first in vitro baby, Louise Joy Brown, born in Oldham in 1978. She considered Diana ‘one of the most fascinating women in my lifetime’ and had ‘read many stories about Princess Diana wishing she had a daughter’.
All this was surely on her mind when she conceived the story of Olivia Franklin, an oncologist who ‘admired Princess Diana and wanted to e mulate her’. Her task becomes somewhat easier when she discovers she is Diana’s secret daughter — the result of fertility tests and procedures which somehow led to another woman being implanted with a royal embryo.
In the novel, Olivia is l i ving in hiding, fearful for her life, because of the supposed threat her existence would pose to the Royal Family.
It’s outrageous stuff even for fiction, but, in Ryan’s mind, her outlandish tale was far from risible. ‘I believe my story could have been true,’ she said. ‘Many have told me that they believe my story is entirely plausible.
‘These same people also think that Prince Charles wanted Diana to be fertile . . . that he might have pushed Diana into having her eggs harvested to prove her fertility.’
And, despite the book clearly being a work of fiction, when it was published at the end of 2011, an astonishing media metamorphosis occurred. Almost overnight, the possibility of Diana having had a secret daughter ceased to be fantasy and began to be promoted as fact.
Globe magazine, a mass-circulation supermarket tabloid published in America, devoted its entire front cover to the screaming headlines: ‘ Bombshell New Book. Princess Diana’s Secret Daughter!’
Opposite a photo of Princess Diana was a picture of an attractive young girl with shoulder-length blonde hair. The girl’s face and smile bore an overwhelming resemblance to Diana.
Was it perhaps a little too overwhelming? A careful study of ‘Sarah’ — as she had started to be named in reports — revealed identical eyeliner to that used by Diana, identically placed eyes, and identical eyebrows, nose and teeth.
In support of its alleged scoop about ‘rumours the Palace has battled to keep under wraps for decades’ and the ‘amazing details about the young woman’s bizarre birth and why she’s living in hiding’, it appeared that the magazine had taken a picture of the real Diana, tilted i t to a different angle and Photoshopped out the lines on her face, then superimposed it on to the body of a young girl.
And if the photograph was a fabrication, the next question to be asked, of course, was whether ‘Sarah’ existed at all — or was she simply a cynical media creation?
But the legend of Diana’s secret daughter had now been given lift-off into that stratosphere where bizarre rumours are instantly believed.
Four months ago, Globe returned to the subject, devoting its front cover to the announcement, Kate Meets Diana’s Secret Daughter!, again with the computer-created photograph of the elusive ‘ Sarah’, who seemed remarkably unwilling to be either seen or heard.
This time the magazine assured its r eaders t hat ‘ Prince William’s pregnant wife Kate carried out a topsecret mission while in New York — quietly meeting with a woman Palace insiders believe is Diana’s secret daughter’.
A ‘royal insider’ insisted: ‘This was the real reason for the couple’s trip to The Big Apple. The other events were just a cover. William wants to know the truth.’
By way of further explanation, it was alleged that Nancy Ryan’s novel ‘spurred a Palace investigator to probe the old rumours about a secret Diana baby — and the path eventually led to Sarah. That’s when William first learned of her existence.
‘Insiders say William didn’t think it “appropriate” to meet Sarah himself, so he asked Kate to have an informal private chat in New York — and arranged the trip.
‘William was stunned when Kate told him she was a mirror image of his mother and really could be his sister.’
It hardly seems necessary to point out that there is not a word of truth in any of these statements. William and Kate’s visit to the U.S. in December — the first made by either of them to New York and to Washington DC — was planned months in advance and undertaken partly on behalf of the British government.
It was certainly not arranged with the object of meeting a ‘secret sister’ whom neither William nor Kate had any reason to believe exists. The couple carried out ten official engagements duri ng t hei r t hr e e - day visit.
In spite of all this, the magazine