Wilhelmina Cooper

Wilhelmina Cooper ( born May 1, 1939 in Culemborg, the Netherlands than Wilhelmina Behmenburg; † March 1, 1980 in Greenwich, Connecticut, United States ) was a model and later founder of modeling agency Wilhelmina Models.

Life

Behmenburg Wilhelmina was born in 1939 in the Netherlands Culemborg and grew up in the German Oldenburg. Her family moved in 1954 to the United States and settled there in Chicago down, where her father worked as a butcher.

Your career as a model began after she accompanied a friend to a modeling school, whose director while her friend refused, but encouraged to modeling. After six months of training she had first shootings. This was followed by larger orders in Chicago and later in Paris and New York. She quickly rose to become one of the most important models in the 1950s and 1960s. In her long career, she appeared on 255 magazine covers, including 27 tracks of American Vogue issue.

In 1965, she married Bruce Cooper, who was previously a producer of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. The marriage later had two children.

Together with her husband she founded in 1967, the modeling agency Wilhelmina Models, in addition to Ford Models in the 1980s, became increasingly important as Elite Model Management, one of the most important model agencies of the United States later. Your agency provided assistance, including the first African-American model Naomi Sims.

Cooper participated in beauty contests like Miss Universe and Miss USA as a member of the board.

Cooper led the agency even after the end of the 1970s she was diagnosed with lung cancer. She died on 1 March 1980 at the age of 40 years at the Greenwich Hospital, Connecticut.

Reception

In the film Gia - Price of Beauty (1998), which tells the life story of the discovered by Cooper and later died of AIDS supermodel Gia Carangi, Cooper was portrayed by Faye Dunaway.