Early Life and Modeling
Carol Patricia Smillie was born in Glasgow, the daughter of George Smillie, an electrical engineer and Isobel Smillie. Smillie is the youngest of four siblings, with two sisters and a brother. Smillie had an idyllic childhood in Glasgow, sharing a room with her two older sisters.
Smillie attended Simshill Primary School. She then attended the independent Hutchesons' Grammar School. Academically she did not shine there, although eventually attaining seven O-levels, including fabric and fashion. She left the following year with three Highers, but needed five to get into the Glasgow School of Art. Smillie studied at Langside College, but only managed one more, which she has attributed to too much freedom and enjoying herself. Undeterred, she spent another year at Cardonald College, finally achieving this goal.
At age 18, Smillie embarked on her first year at the Glasgow School of Art, studying Art, Design and Fashion, with the idea of becoming a fashion designer. Smillie felt she didn’t really fit in with the typical punk students sporting green hair and pink shoes. To subsidise her studies Smillie worked in a cocktail bar, modelling part-time. Smillie left to embark on modelling as her career.
Smillie joined the Best Modelling Agency, run by Fiona Best. Too short at 5 ft 5 in (1.65 m) for catwalk modelling, she worked for photo shoots and promotions. Smillie worked for the agency throughout the eighties. Smillie met former model and her future husband Alex Knight through Fiona's agency. Her breakthrough came at age 27 when she successfully auditioned for the hostess job on the Wheel of Fortune game show.
Read more about this topic: Carol Smillie
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or modeling:
“Early education can only promise to help make the third and fourth and fifth years of life good ones. It cannot insure without fail that any tomorrow will be successful. Nothing “fixes” a child for life, no matter what happens next. But exciting, pleasing early experiences are seldom sloughed off. They go with the child, on into first grade, on into the child’s long life ahead.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)
“It is high time we realized that the havoc wrought in human life and ideals by a technological revolution and too long ignored has caught up with us.”
—Agnes E. Meyer (1887–1970)
“The computer takes up where psychoanalysis left off. It takes the ideas of a decentered self and makes it more concrete by modeling mind as a multiprocessing machine.”
—Sherry Turkle (b. 1948)