One of the supermodels who was ubiquitous on fashion runways, magazine covers and TV commercials in the late 1980s and ’90s, Tatiana Patitz died Wednesday. she was 56 years old.
Her New York agent, Model CoOp’s Corinne Nicolas, announced her passing on Facebook. Nicholas’ post didn’t say when or where Patitz died, but she told website insiders that her cause was cancer.
Ms. Patitz (pronounced Patitz) was a teenager in the early 1980s when she embarked on a path that would eventually lead her to the pinnacle of her modeling career.
In 2016, she told Prestige Hong Kong magazine: I was one of her finalists and came in third. They sent me to Paris. It all started there. ”
Still, she said it took her a while to build her career as a model.
“Things didn’t fall into my lap,” she said.
By the late 1980s, however, she was in demand.A 1988 photo of Ms. Patitz and five others in white shirts, taken by German photographer Peter Lindbergh, marked the beginning of her career. and other supermodel careers. Mr. Lindbergh’s cover became the touchstone of the fascinating photography of the time.
That image led to one of Patitz’s most famous appearances. It’s music videos, not magazines or runways. Pop star George Michael saw the cover and saw his song “Freedom! ’90.
It was the heyday of the MTV era, when videos of models lip-syncing to songs received heavy play and, as the British newspaper The Mail put it in a 1995 article, “made girls look like every adolescent pop star.” Burned my brain “From Minsk to Montevideo”
The photo shoot has taken Ms. Patitz around the world. In 1999, the British Sunday Telegraph wrote about her and her home outside Malibu, California.
“I can virtually trace where my work has taken me just by looking around,” she told the newspaper, adding that Balinese bowls and Buddha statues, Moroccan kilims, Indian cushions, and the I pointed out the wooden suitcase from Montana that I was using as a table. “I don’t have a lot, but when I see something I like, I buy it. I have a lot of memories at home.”
Patitz was born on May 25, 1966 in what was then Hamburg, West Germany. She lived in Sweden from the age of 7 and at the age of 17 she went to Paris to pursue a career as a model.
Patitz has appeared in numerous major magazines since the 1980s, but is also known for her work in television commercials, sometimes using her glamorous looks for comic effect.
In 1988’s Levi’s, a stout young man in an unbuttoned shirt and boxers but no pants walks into a dingy diner on a hot day. She works at the counter. He walks up to her and has a moment of her sexual chemistry, but what he really wants are his jeans in the refrigerator behind her. In the UK, watchdog groups have demanded that ads not be shown when children may be watching.
A 1990 Stainmaster carpet commercial featured Patitz in evening wear, a well-dressed man and a table with a candlelit dinner. The man was apparently distracted by her beauty and knocked over the entire table, spilling his meal onto the stain-resistant carpet. A second ad featured the same couple and ended with the hood his fight. “A wall-to-wall pile has never looked so sexy,” Entertainment Weekly said, citing him as one of his best ads of 1991.
Her work in commercials and music videos landed Patitz several film and television roles in the 1990s. In particular, Sean is best known for her role in the crime drama Rising Sun (1993), starring Connery and Wesley Snipes and based on Michael Crichton. novel.
“For Swedish newcomer Tatiana Patitz — the supermodel-turned-actress who was the dead ringer of young Lauren Bacall at age 26 — as a murder victim in 20th Century Fox’s new release The Rising Sun. A mostly nude performance, the Los Angeles Times wrote in 1993: Her character dies in a sadomasochistic sexual encounter.
“I thought, ‘Oh my god, I don’t want my parents to see that,'” she told the newspaper.
The supermodel days faded in the mid-1990s, but Patitz continued to work occasionally. An animal lover since childhood, he spent a lot of time with dogs, cats, horses and birds. Her 2000s marriage to Jason Johnson ended in her divorce. Their son, Jonah, survived her.
