For five decades, appearing on Page 3 of British tabloid The Sun was a passport to instant fame. In that section, topless images of stunning young women were published, aspiring to become models, singers, actresses, or simply famous for the sake of it, delighting millions of Britons. The feminist movement succeeded in canceling Page 3, thus restoring women's dignity, but many of those leading ladies still continue to relish in their heyday. Among them is Samantha Fox (57), who made her first appearance in 1983 at the age of 16. Immediately after, she was expelled from the Catholic school she attended.
Such was her success that she became the first and only one to secure an exclusive four-year contract with the newspaper, allowing them to take as many photos of her as necessary. In the 1980s, she became a sex symbol in Britain, sharing with Margaret Thatcher and Lady Di the honor of being one of the most photographed women of the decade.
She later turned her hand to singing, sold over 30 million records, and became a master of scandal and tragedies. A few days ago, due to her intoxicated state, she got into a fight with a fellow passenger on a British Airways flight between London and Munich, forcing the pilot to return to the airport of origin. The flight was canceled for the following day.
This is not the only scandal that Samantha has been involved in. The most recent one dates back to 2015 when alcohol caused another problem on a Wizz Air flight between the English city of Luton and Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. She insulted passengers and the crew because she disagreed with being charged £30 for excess weight in her carry-on. In the early days of her career, during the promotion of her successful single Touch Me (1986), she dared to appear on television with ripped jeans at butt level, leading the BBC to censor her performance. In 2017, she publicly confessed that in 1985, she had been sexually abused by musician and actor David Cassidy, who forced her to have sex against her will in a restaurant.
At the peak of her fame, she was at the center of another major scandal when a Colombian cartel kingpin paid her $50,000 to sing a couple of songs at his daughter's birthday in Colombia. Her breasts were so famous that they were insured for a million pounds, but there were certain rules, such as not being allowed to sunbathe topless. Faced with such a lucrative source of income and having become a millionaire, her father began squandering immense amounts of money on alcohol and cocaine because he served as her manager. This led the artist to sue him for embezzlement, and they stopped talking for a decade.
Samantha's relationship with her father was not without its altercations. When she was a young girl, she asked him for some of the money she had earned to buy a radio for her car, but her father responded with violence. "I thought he was going to kill me, and I begged him to stop. When I tried to get up, he kicked me so hard in the stomach that I was left breathless and couldn't stop," the artist confessed on several occasions. Her sister Vanessa defended her on more than one occasion.
When her father passed away last year aged 50 due to a heart failure, Samantha almost lost her reason to live. The same happened when her first wife, Myra Stratton, died of cancer in 2015 after twelve years of marriage. In 2022, she remarried Linda Birgitte Olsen, who has two children from her previous marriage.