Samantha Fox

London, Aug. 11: This could hit hard boys who grew up in the 1980s.

Samantha Fox, the pin-up who once gave wings to your fantasies and probably adorned some secret corner of your room, is tying the knot with another woman.

Samantha, who became a Page 3 superstar in Britain long before the term invaded India and Rakhi Sawant became television’s stun-gun, has announced her engagement with long-time lover and manager Myra Stratton.

“We might get married here (in the UK) and have the do (party) in Siberia,” Samantha told the latest issue of OK! magazine. “We might get Liz Mitchell of BoneyM to do the ceremony — she’s a pastor now.”

Samantha said she and Myra would like to have children, but admitted the problem is “finding the time. And how? How? How?”

She ought to consider sending a wedding invitation to Bappi Lahiri who introduced her to Bollywood. It was thanks to Lahiri, musical director in the 1995 film Rock Dancer, that Samantha, once Britain’s favourite pin-up, made a guest appearance as herself.

Lahiri is proud of the connection. “I convinced Samantha Fox to star in and sing for my home production, Rock Dancer,” he had said in one interview.

In Britain and in some parts of India, Samantha had became the ultimate fantasy figure for schoolboys when she appeared topless as a 17-year-old for the Sun newspaper, aptly headlined “Sam, 16, Quits A-Levels for Ooh-Levels”.

Reborn first as a Christian and then as a lesbian, the bubbly Samantha could reconcile all her differing activities: “Easily. God gave me my body. I know it has made many people happy. I am doing what God wants me to do.”

Some would say that at 43, Samantha now looks more beautiful than she perhaps did during her modelling days. Then she was merely an object of adolescent male desire when the talking point was how she insured her breasts for £750,000 (Rs 6 crore at current rates).

Samantha and Myra met when the model went through a court case with her father, Patrick Fox, who was her manager. She split from her record company and accused her father of siphoning away her earnings, sued him for £1million and got £363,000 in an out-of-court settlement in 1995. Samantha and her father only met once after that - there was no reconciliation - but she did go to his funeral in 2000.

Myra was recommended to her as a replacement manager by an actor, and the pair bonded immediately.

After her modelling days, Samantha became a singer, but the girl from the East End of London will be remembered by many men as “the best Page 3 pin-up ever”.

She did have a number of unsuccessful relationships with men, one of whom boasted ungallantly about his conquest in a “kiss and tell” account he sold to a tabloid. Rumours about her sexual orientation began to surface in 1999. In 2003, Samantha publicly declared she was in love with Myra but added: “People keep trying to say I’m a lesbian. I don’t know what I am.”