THE BUSINESS OF FAME
SOUTH EAST ASIA GLOBE
www.sea-globe.com
BY CAMERON COOPER
DATE PUBLISHED: 10 NOVEMBER 2009 ISSUE

SEA GLOBE is the leading source for English language news, views, and life in Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos.

Paula Taylor, Thailand’s most successful model and Geoff Heydt, a talent representative, explain how to make a face very famous.

Five sets of false eyelashes winked from a clear plastic box. A large shoulder bag stuffed with spray cans, brushes, clips and enough chemicals to blow up a city was splayed open on the table beside huge palettes of makeup and mink hair brushes. A man and a woman poked and prodded a quiet female in a chair who was serenely sending messages on a Blackberry.

The person at the centre of these ministrations was Paula Taylor, a woman whose face has beamed from countless billboards, magazine covers, televisions and movie screens in Thailand and several other Southeast Asian countries for well over a decade.

The product of a Thai mother and English father and raised in Australia, Taylor has evolved from a cute but unknown teenage model into a self-managed widely recognised brand. At the age of 26 – positively ancient in Asian model terms – she has just completed a year where she had the perhaps dubious honour of appearing on more Thai magazine covers than any other famous face. (more…)