Modelling career

In early 1983, 16-year-old Samantha Fox posed in her bedroom, wearing lingerie, while her mother Carole took pictures for The Sunday People newspaper's "Face and Shape of 1983" amateur modelling contest. Fox came joint runner-up in the contest, The Sunday People published her pictures, and a photographer from The Sun newspaper invited her for a professional photoshoot shortly afterwards. On Tuesday, 22 February 1983, with the full support of her parents, Samantha Fox made her first topless Page Three girl appearance in The Sun. She was still almost two months shy of her 17th birthday.

Fox's bubbly-blonde looks, winning smile, working-class background, and curvaceous 36D breasts, which looked disproportionately large on her diminutive 5 ft 1 in (1.55 m) frame, quickly made her an iconic figure. Months after she started modelling, she famously insured her breasts for a quarter of a million pounds sterling.

Fox went on to win The Sun's "Page Three Girl of the Year" award for three consecutive years (1984, 1985, and 1986), and her popularity helped usher in the 1980s taste for top-heavy Page Three girls: Busty models like the 36DD Tracy Neve and the 38DD Maria Whittaker achieved considerable success in the wake of Fox's celebrity. Fox also appeared in British soft-porn magazines, although very few full-frontal nude shots were ever published.

Fox announced her retirement from Page Three modelling in 1986, at the age of 20. In 1995, aged 29, she made a one-off appearance in The Sun to promote Page Three's 25th anniversary week. After an overwhelmingly positive reader response, she appeared in the slot every day during the anniversary week, with Friday's final topless picture given away as an A3-sized poster. In 1996, aged 30, she appeared in the October issue of Playboy magazine. These were her final published nude photos.

Fox's father managed her modelling career in the early days, but the two split acrimoniously when she found that he was embezzling her money. Her parents later divorced.