Pattie Boyd inspired Something, Layla and Wonderful Tonight, then picked up a camera
Few people can claim songs by two rock legends as love letters. Pattie Boyd, a model who met George Harrison on the set of A Hard Day's Night, prompted his Something and later Eric Clapton's Layla and Wonderful Tonight. Decades on, she turned the lens around and exhibited her own intimate photographs of both men.
Boyd was born in Taunton, Somerset, on 17 March 1944, and spent part of her childhood in Kenya, boarding at a school near Nairobi from the age of eight. She came home on a half-term break to discover her parents had divorced, and moved back to England with her mother and stepfather in 1953. After leaving school with three O levels she trained as a beautician at Elizabeth Arden in London until a client from Honey magazine nudged her towards modelling.
From 1962 she worked for Vogue, Elle and the big newspapers, shot by David Bailey and Terence Donovan. With Jean Shrimpton she came to embody the British look of miniskirts and long straight hair, and Twiggy modelled her early style on Boyd's. Mary Quant wrote in 1966 that women now wanted to resemble Boyd rather than Marlene Dietrich.
Director Richard Lester spotted her in a crisps advert and gave her a small part as a pupil in A Hard Day's Night, where Harrison asked her out. She was seeing someone else, so she said no at first, but within days they were dating. They married at Epsom register office in January 1966 and spent six weeks in India that autumn with Ravi Shankar, where she began learning the dilruba, a bowed string instrument. Hostility from fans led Harrison to press her to give up her career, and in 1968 she and her sister opened a Chelsea boutique named Jennifer Juniper after a Donovan song.
The marriage ended in 1977, and two years later she wed Clapton, a mutual friend; they divorced in 1989. A member of the Royal Photographic Society, she felt ready to revisit her old pictures only in 2004, and the show Through the Eye of a Muse opened in San Francisco on Valentine's Day 2005. In 1991 she co-founded an addiction recovery charity with Barbara Bach.
Source: Pattie Boyd
