Celebrating her 40th birthday today, supermodel Kate Moss says she would probably be working in a bar in Croydon if she had not been discovered.

The Croydon-born catwalk star, who was spotted at New York’s JFK airport aged 14, has graced thousands of covers and walked down countless catwalks since a photoshoot in style magazine The Face made her a star.

Her waifish looks, party lifestyle, and a string of celebrity partners, including Johnny Depp and Pete Doherty, have kept her in the headlines for years and she has worked with almost every major fashion designer, including Louis Vuitton and Stella McCartney, as well as being the face of make-up company Rimmel.

The supermodel rarely gives interviews but has spoken about the toll her work took on her, especially in her early years in the industry.

Your Local Guardian: Kate Moss poses for the media for the start of London Fashion Week in 1997

She told Vanity Fair she had a nervous breakdown while she was still a teenager while working on a campaign for Calvin Klein in the early 1990s.

But Moss recovered and her career has gone from strength to strength.

Earlier this year she posed in bunny ears for the cover of Playboy magazine.

She featured in 18 pages of the January/February issue of the racy magazine, as well as the cover, to celebrate the publication’s 60th anniversary.

In the interview which accompanied the pictures she said: “I was, like, a child when I started. I was 14.

"If it hadn't happened, I don't know what would have happened to me. I would be in Croydon, working in a bar, probably."

In 2011, she married rocker Jamie Hince in a star-studded ceremony in a rural Cotswolds village, with former partner Jefferson Hack - the father of her daughter Lila - among the guests.


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