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Model and movie star whose life story was the inspiration behind the film Funny Face

In 1944, the 21-year-old Richard Avedon, just starting out as a professional photographer after leaving the Us merchant marine, walked into a bank in Manhattan, New York, and saw a 19-year-old clerk called Dorcas Nowell. It was love at first sight. He called her Doe because of her deer-like eyes, and they soon married. Doe Avedon, who has died aged 86, was the first muse of the man who was to become America's leading fashion and portrait photographer.

Richard Avedon, who had begun to get work as a photographer for the fashion magazine Harper's Bazaar, made his wife into a top model, against her own inclinations. Although Doe gradually backed out of the limelight as a model – one of the last photos Richard took of her was posing in a fur-lined Christian Dior coat and hat at...

Model and actress Doe Avedon Siegel, best known for her marriages to photographer Richard Avedon and to Dirty Harry movie director Don Siegel, died Sunday in Los Angeles. She was 86. Born Dorcas Nowell (on April 7, 1928) in Westbury, New York, she was discovered by Avedon, who married her in 1944. (Avedon herself told journalists she began her acting career while working as a waitress.) A highly romanticized version of their courtship was turned into a would-be play by Leonard Gershe, Funny Face, which finally was produced as a Paramount musical in 1957, starring Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn under the direction of Stanley Donen. By then, the Avedons had been divorced for six years. Doe Avedon's stage debut took place in 1948, in the Broadway production of N. Richard Nash's The Young and Fair, which also featured Julie Harris, Rita Gam, and future Oscar winner Mercedes McCambridge. For her efforts, Avedon was...

The 1958 film The Boss looks like a movie that would be right at home on Mystery Science Theater 3000. The movie tries to be a gritty gangster film, but instead, the audience is treated to endless exposition, shoot-outs with no blood, and characters who make decisions that make no sense whatsoever. At the beginning of the film, there is a title card stating that it is up to local communities to be vigilant and stop these bosses, but by the end of the film, I was more concerned about protecting innocent audiences from The Boss.

The Boss opens with a military parade. World War I has just ended, and a small town is welcoming home its soldiers. Matt Brady (John Payne) is the town's big war hero as well as the mayor's brother, and he has a schoolteacher girlfriend Elsie (Doe Avedon) waiting for him. In his first night home,...