Cindy Crawford has said that she narrowly avoided being kidnapped as a young model in Paris.
The star said it was only years later that she realised she had found herself in a scenario similar to the plot of Hollywood thriller Taken, starring Liam Neeson.
Having stepped off a flight at the French capital’s Charles de Gaulle airport en route to a job, she said she got into a car with a strange driver who tricked her into thinking he was sent by her agency.
Miss Crawford, 47, said she got into the vehicle after seeing a man holding a card with her name.
She assumed he had been sent to pick her up, ‘but then when I asked him questions, I realised he didn’t know anything.
‘I guess someone had seen me getting on the plane and he turned up there.’
Quick-thinking Miss Crawford said she waited until the car stopped at a traffic light ‘and then jumped out’.
At the time, she was in her 20s and at the height of her fame as one of the original ‘supers’ along with Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista and Tatjana Patitz.
She had appeared on countless magazine covers and in high- profile ad campaigns.
When she watched 2008’s Taken, she realised how similar her experience was to the story of a man whose daughter is kidnapped in Paris after sharing a cab with a scout from a kidnapping gang.
‘I thought, “God, that could have been me”,’ she said.
Speaking to Net-a-Porter magazine The Edit, the model also opened up about her body image.
At 40, she claimed she was the happiest she had ever been with her shape, but as she approaches her 50s Miss Crawford said she is once again struggling to ‘come to terms’ with her figure.
The mother-of-two admitted that despite her continued fame as a model, she would love to lose five pounds.
She added: ‘I’m a normal woman, sometimes I feel pretty good and some days I’m like, “oh my God, nothing fits”.
‘My new resolution is that by the time I am 50, I want to have come to terms with my body.’
But Cindy said shifting the weight was not worth the gruelling regime it would take. She said: ‘For me, being five pounds lighter, what it would cost me . . . I don’t want to be like, “oh no, no salad dressing, no wine, no fun”.’
Talking about her early career, Miss Crawford said: ‘I was willing to do things that weren’t necessarily the next thing you should do, like MTV or Playboy, things that even my agency wasn’t sure about me doing. I was like, “why not? Let’s try it”.
‘I think some of the young girls saw me as someone who used the business back, not just getting eaten up by it.
‘It’s like women’s rights or everything else – you break the glass ceiling a little each time.’
