Thursday, 26 May 2011
By SAM FOX
Friend and former Page 3 girl
I STILL can't believe she has gone. She was from the East End of London, like me, so we hit it off straight away.
I had been modelling for about a year and took her under my wing because it was all new to her.
We became great friends and stayed that way until the end. She was so bubbly and never took her lifestyle for granted.
She was a natural beauty and my favourite Page 3 girl. But she also had a big heart and was always there for me as a friend when I needed her through the years.
Even when she was modelling, she had aspirations to be an artist and loved her painting. But she was always proud of her Page 3 days and never regretted them.
She had been fighting the cancer for a while but remained very positive and so strong throughout it all.
And she didn't change - she still looked amazing to the end.
The blonde beauty was a massively popular pin-up during the Eighties and Nineties.
Her 34-24-34 figure set millions of hearts racing and she was insured for a staggering £11million at the height of her fame.
Husband and childhood sweetheart Frank Camilleri, a property developer, said last night: "Suzanne was a beautiful person inside and out.
"She was a Page 3 girl, model, celebrity, artist and interior designer. She had an amazing life. We were together for 30 years."
Legendary Page 3 photographer Beverley Goodway, whose pictures turned her into a star, said: "It is tremendously sad news.
"She was one of Page 3's most successful and best-loved models. She was exquisitely pretty, just gorgeous, with amazing eyes, and the readers loved her.
"She was a wonderful person and great fun to work with, always very professional, organised and determined.
"You could count on her to make a shoot work, come what may.
"It always made me smile to see her put on make-up before a shoot. She would concentrate so hard that she would frown in front of the mirror - but in front of the camera she just lit up.
"Frank was always with her and it was always obvious how much they were devoted to each other."
Suzanne, who leaves behind a seven-year-old son Geo and daughter Sienna, six, died on Sunday afternoon at St Joseph's hospice in Hackney, east London, near her home.
She had been battling ovarian cancer for more than a year.
Suzanne shot to fame in 1984 after posing on Page 3 at 17.
Within weeks she was getting more than £1,000 a time for personal appearances.
She was in such huge demand - along with her great pal and fellow Page 3 star Sam Fox - that she posed for 26 calendars in the next six months.
By the age of 21 she had a three-year, £400,000 contract to launch her own lingerie range for Dorothy Perkins.
In 1991 she was voted the girl most men would like to take shopping in Paris by Esquire magazine and her bee-sting lips were familiar in commercials for brand giants such as Kellogg's, Marlboro and Fiat.
Suzanne went on to achieve success as a catwalk model for top designers, signing for elite model agency Storm, and also spending three years as the face of fashion designer Vivienne Westwood.
A lingerie company even took out an £11million insurance policy on her face and body.
In the past ten years she was a successful artist and interior designer known as Mizzy. Her abstract paintings sold for up to £10,000.
Suzanne, who divided her time between family homes in London, Spain and Malta, where she was born, once told how Page 3 opened up a life of fame and glamour that she loved. She said: "I travelled the world. It was an amazing opportunity. We were part of a British institution - treated like movie stars."
But she was also proud of her later career. She added: "People think it's strange that a Page 3 girl is now an interior designer but I have always cared about the environment in which I live.
"Even as a teenager, my bedroom was always immaculate and when my friends used to come round they always said how beautiful it was.
"My work shows there's much more to me than a pretty face that used to appear on Page 3 years ago."
