Cindy Crawford

Cynthia Ann Crawford (born February 20, 1966), known as Cindy Crawford, is an American model, actress and television personality.

Crawford was born in DeKalb, Illinois, on February 20, 1966, the daughter of Daniel Kenneth Crawford and Jennifer Sue Crawford-Moluf (née Walker).

She has two sisters, Chris and Danielle, and a brother, Jeffery, who died of childhood leukemia at age 3.

On social media, she has stated that her family had been in the United States for generations and that her ancestry was mostly German, English, and French.

She is a descendant of English Puritan settler Thomas Trowbridge, who helped establish the Congregational Church in New Haven.

During the 1980s and 1990s, she was among the most popular supermodels and a ubiquitous presence on magazine covers and runways, as well as fashion campaigns.

She subsequently expanded into acting and business ventures.

In 1983, she entered Elite's Look of the Year contest at 17 and made the national finals.

Crawford graduated from DeKalb High School in 1984 as valedictorian.

She earned an academic scholarship to study chemical engineering at Northwestern University, which she attended for only one quarter before dropping out to pursue a full-time modeling career.

After working for photographer Victor Skrebneski in Chicago, she moved to New York City in 1986 and signed with the Elite New York modeling agency.

In 1987, Crawford appeared in the opening credits of the Michael J. Fox film The Secret of My Success.

In July 1988, she posed nude for Playboy magazine in a shoot by photographer Herb Ritts.

From 1989 to 1995, Crawford was host and executive producer of MTV's House of Style.

Three years later, she was featured alongside top models Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, Tatjana Patitz and Naomi Campbell on the cover of the January 1990 edition of British Vogue.

Crawford and the other four models subsequently appeared in the video for George Michael's hit "Freedom! '90" later that year.

The inaugural issue of George, a short lived political magazine in the 1990s, featured Crawford dressed like George Washington on the cover.

The red Versace dress she wore to the 63rd Academy Awards in 1991 had a major influence on fashion, and many copies and fakes of the dress were produced.

In 1992, Crawford—through GoodTimes Home Video and her company Crawdaddy Productions—made an exercise video with Radu Teodorescu named Cindy Crawford: Shape Your Body; although criticised by some for being unsafe, it was hugely successful and led to two equally lucrative followups, Cindy Crawford: The Next Challenge in 1993 (again with Radu) and Cindy Crawford: A New Dimension in 2000; the latter, made with fitness expert Kathy Kaehler and produced not long after Crawford gave birth to her first child, was aimed at new mothers getting back into shape.

Subsequently, Crawford played the lost love of Jon Bon Jovi in the 1994 video for his version of "Please Come Home For Christmas", "John Taylor" in the 2011 video for Duran Duran's "Girl Panic" (featuring supermodels as the band, including Naomi Campbell as Simon Le Bon), and Headmistress in the 2015 video for Taylor Swift's "Bad Blood" as part of a cast including Jessica Alba, Selena Gomez, and fellow models Lily Aldridge, Cara Delevingne, Gigi Hadid, Martha Hunt and Karlie Kloss.

She was frequently featured on the cover of multiple fashion and lifestyle magazines, including Vogue, W, People, Harper's Bazaar, Elle, Cosmopolitan, and Allure.

A 1997 Shape magazine survey of 4,000 picked her as the second (after Demi Moore) most beautiful woman in the world.

A partial count in 1998 totalled over 500 appearances.

Crawford has walked the runway shows for Chanel, Versace, Dolce & Gabbana, Christian Dior, Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Roberto Cavalli, Michael Kors, Thierry Mugler, Todd Oldham, DKNY, and Valentino.

Crawford also appeared in many fashion campaigns during her career, including those for Versace, Calvin Klein, Escada, David Yurman, Oscar De La Renta, Balmain, Hermes, Ellen Tracy, Valentino, Bally, Liz Claiborne, Hervé Leger, Halston, Anne Klein, Isaac Mizrahi, Blumarine, Guess, Ink, Gap, and Revlon.

She has also worked for Omega, Maybelline, Clairol, Pepsi, and Chilean retail stores Ripley (partner of Macy's).

In October 1998, Crawford returned to the pages of Playboy for a second nude pictorial, again taken by Ritts.

In 2001, Crawford also made a shorter fitness video aimed at children, Mini-Muscles with Cindy Crawford and the Fit-wits, an animated production featuring the voices of Crawford (who also appears at the beginning in live action), Radu and Kobe Bryant.

In 2002, Crawford was named one of the 50 most beautiful people by People magazine.

In 2005, the American Society of Magazine Editors listed it as the 22nd best magazine cover of the last 40 years.

Crawford has also been on TV and in films.

In her forties, she claimed No. 26 in the 2006 Hot 100 issue of Maxim magazine.

She was named No. 3 on VH1's 40 Hottest Hotties of the 90s and was named one of the "100 Hottest Women of All-Time" by Men's Health.

She was ranked number 5 on Playboy's list of the 100 sexiest stars of the 20th century.

She was raised in the Congregationalist faith and found it “incredible” that religious passion “trickled down" to her family. According to census records Crawford’s paternal great-grandfather David Crawford was from Northern Ireland who settled in Wisconsin. Appearing in an episode of Who Do You Think You Are? in 2013, she discovered that her ancestors included European nobility and that she was descended from Charlemagne.

In her sophomore year at high school, she received a call from a local clothing store regarding modeling work, only to discover it was a prank by two of her classmates.

However, the following year, another store hired a number of high school girls, including Crawford, to work for them (including a fashion shoot).

In her junior year, local photographer Roger Legel, whose duties included photographing a different college girl to be that week's coed in the DeKalb Nite Weekly, asked to take her picture for the publication; the result was Crawford's first cover.

The photo and positive feedback she received were enough to convince her to take up modeling.

Initially, she worked with a small agency, which was sold to Elite Model Management shortly after she signed.