Thaindian News

London, Mar 23 (ANI): The poster of a tennis girl hitching her skirt to reveal her bare bottom was an iconic image in the 1970s.

Yet for 35 years, not many knew the identity of the girl, who made the poster world famous.

Now, for the first time, she has decided to turn the other cheek.

Fiona Walker, then Butler, has been reunited with the image to promote what organisers are billing as the first exhibition on lawn tennis as a subject in art, reports the Telegraph.

More than two million copies of the sexy poster, which will appear in the exhibition, have been sold worldwide.

“I think it’s the light that makes it so appealing,” said Walker, now 52.

The model, who went on to become a mother of three and freelance illustrator, has never earned a penny from it.

“‘I was very naive and was paid nothing, and I think it’s the biggest-selling poster ever. My mother has a very faded copy in what used to be my father’s study and I just have it in the form of a very small postcard,” she said.

Walker was not a keen tennis player and borrowed her tennis dress from a ‘friend of a friend’, her father’s plimsolls, and used ‘the dog’s’ tennis balls for the image.

She said she had no regrets, but that she had ‘no idea whatsoever’ that the poster, which was used in a calendar, would become so popular when she posed aged 18.

“It never ceases to make me smile when I see it sometimes. I see it in very strange places. I think my children tell people that it’s me but most people don’t believe it,” she said.

Martin Elliott, the photographer behind ‘Tennis Girl’, who was the model’s boyfriend when he took the snapshot, died last year at the age of 63.

“It has a place in the history of tennis. I think Martin Elliott would be very proud of the fact that his picture is in the exhibition,” said Walker.

‘Court On Canvas: Tennis In Art’ runs from May 27 to September 18 at The Barber Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Birmingham. (ANI)