Four decades ago, Josie Borain’s androgynous beauty catapulted her from suburbia to international fame. On billboards, she strode across Times Square and towered above Piccadilly Circus. Last year, she celebrated her 60th birthday, a year after launching her third act by quitting Cape Town for life in a rural hamlet. Vermaaklikheid is 300km from Cape Town and light years from the stratosphere Josie once occupied when she was one of the most photographed and highly paid women in the world.
One of the first things you intuit about her is that she’s clear-eyed about what really matters in life. Blinding glamour aside, she’s a woman who has had her portion of heartache and anxiety. Married and widowed by 25; remarried and divorced in her 40s; parent to three children; being financially self-reliant… It can’t all have been one perfectly lit bokeh close-up. But she’s far too polite to publicly bewail her struggles or, for that matter, to brandish her significant triumphs.
Being spotted by an agent at 18 was a springboard, but her achievements have been the result of her own talent, work ethic and good financial hygiene.
At 17, after leaving school in Johannesburg without matric, Josie followed her boyfriend to Cape Town, where she took up modelling to pay thedigital era, scoring a CK billboard can supersize a model’s career. In the 1980s that power was hypersonic. Looking back, she’s amused at how casually unaware she was. ‘I saw my face plastered all over Times Square and I took only one photograph.’
