In early 1983, Carole Fox submitted several pictures of her teenage daughter to the The Sunday People newspaper’s “Face and Shape of 1983″ amateur modeling contest. Judged joint runner-up in the contest, Fox had her pictures published, and was shortly afterward invited for a photo shoot for The Sun tabloid newspaper’s Page Three feature. Her parents gave their consent for their daughter to pose topless, and on Tuesday, February 22, 1983, Fox’s first Page Three photograph was published under the headline “Sam, 16, Quits A-Levels for Ooh-Levels.”
Fox quickly became a popular Page Three model. Indeed, her Cockney background, bubbly-blonde looks, winning smile, and curvaceous 36D breasts arguably made her Britain’s premiere sex symbol of the 1980s. After famously insuring her breasts for a quarter of a million pounds sterling, she went on to win The Sun’s Page Three Girl of the Year award for three consecutive years between 1984 and 1986. She also posed nude for British soft-porn magazines, although very few full-frontal shots were ever published.
Fox retired from Page Three modeling in 1986, at the age of 20. In 1995, aged 29, she made a one-off appearance in The Sun to promote Page Three’s 25th anniversary week. After an overwhelmingly positive reader response, she appeared in the slot every day during the anniversary week, with Friday’s final topless picture given away as an A3-sized poster. In 1996, aged 30, she appeared in the October issue of Playboy magazine. These were her final published nude photos.
Fox’s father Patrick, a former carpenter, managed her career until 1991, when Fox hired accountants to trace over £1 million that she believed he had embezzled from her accounts. She then sued her father, who by then had divorced and remarried, and in May 1995 she was awarded a £363,000 court settlement. Patrick Fox died in 2000, at which time he and Fox had not spoken for almost a decade.
Samantha Fox was, in a online vote held by the British Newspaper the Daily Star, voted by its readers, as ‘The best page 3 pin up ever’ in September 2008. As a result of the poll win, she appeared topless for the first time in 12 years in the Daily Star although on page 5, not page 3.
