Penelope Tree

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Penelope Tree (1950-) is an Anglo-American supermodel. Her family objected to her career as a model, and when she was first photographed at the age of thirteen by Diane Arbus, her father, Ronald Tree, a British multimillionaire, vowed he would sue if the pictures were published. Her mother was a Boston socialite, Marietta (Peabody) Tree.[1]

Cecil Beaton also photographed Tree's elfin face, one that made "The Tree" a match for "The Twig" in the 1960s. By the time Diana Vreeland sent her to Richard Avedon, she was seventeen and her father had relented. David Bailey (photographer) described Penelope as 'an Egyptian Jimminy Cricket". In 1967, she moved into Bailey's flat in London's Primose Hill neighbourhood. It became a hang-out for spaced-out hippies during the "Swinging Sixties", who, Bailey recalled, would be "smoking joints I had paid for and calling me a capitalist pig!" In 1974, Bailey and Tree split up and she moved to Sydney, Australia to remove herself from the focus of the fashion photographer's camera. She appeared in the British comedy film The Rutles in 1978. [2] She is a half-sister of US author Frances FitzGerald.

A long time resident of Australia, she has been married twice, once to the South African rock musician Ricky Fataar. She has two children, Michael, who studies at Sevenoaks School, Kent, and Paloma Fataar (a graduate of Bard College and a student of Tibetan culture and music).

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