Who

The all-American Turlington has been a top model for almost 20 years, and the woman by Ed Burns' side for the past few.

Backstory

The daughter of a pilot and a flight attendant, Turlington was discovered at age 13 by a photographer while riding her horse near her family's home in Miami. She signed up with Ford Models at age 16, moved to New York to model full time at 18, and had the good fortune to land on the fashion scene just as the 1980s supermodel phenomenon was peaking. Along with Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, and Naomi Campbell, Turlington was in the top tier of star models in the early '90s, scoring coveted contracts with Maybelline and Calvin Klein, appearing on hundreds of magazine covers, and making appearances in movies (Robert Altman's Prêt-à-Porter, the Isaac Mizrahi doc Unzipped) and music videos (George Michael, Duran Duran). In 1994, she abandoned the fashion world to earn a bachelor's degree at NYU, where she majored in comparative religion and philosophy and graduated cum laude. By 2000 Turlington had more or less retired from modeling in order to focus on new endeavors, such as her two workout-wear lines with Puma (Nuala and Mahanuala) and an ayurvedic skincare line called Sundari. But she returned to the biz in 2006 after reeling in a multiyear contract with Maybelline, reportedly worth more than $1 million a year.

Medical file

After her father passed away from lung cancer, Turlington quit smoking for good; in a cruel twist, she was diagnosed with early-stage emphysema five years after quitting. She now works as an anti-smoking activist for the CDC and the American Cancer Society.

Personal

Turlington dated a number of high-profile actors during the 1990s, including Christian Slater and Jason Patric. In 2003, she married filmmaker Ed Burns. They live in the Tribeca loft that JFK Jr. used to call home and have two kids, Finn and Grace.