How Kate Moss played Maid Marian in Blackadder… and if you think that’s bizarre, read these 50 things you never knew about the supermodel on the day she turns 50

Kate Moss has hosted some of the most legendary parties in British history, from her Beautiful And The Damned-themed 30th held in a Claridges suite to her Eighties-themed 40th that started in Mayfair and ended 48 hours later in her ten-bedroom Cotswolds home.

For her 50th, however, the Croydon supermodel has eschewed hedonism for heat, jetting off with her nearest and dearest to Mustique. Now sober and the proud owner of a wellness brand, Cosmoss, the only thing Kate is likely to be falling out of is her bikini top, as she celebrates her milestone birthday today with close family and friends.

I’ve interviewed Kate three times and each time I found her fiercely private — cameras were banned at her previous birthday party and are expected to be vetoed at this event, too.

But delicious details do slip out about her. So to celebrate her half century, here Laura Craik shares 50 things that are less known about her extraordinary life…

1 AN 18ct gold statue of her, right, by Marc Quinn, was put on display at the British Museum.

2 Of her seven tattoos, some are more visible — and valuable — than others. In 2012, she revealed in an interview with Vanity Fair that the two small swallows on the base of her spine were etched by the late painter Lucian Freud, who famously painted her naked in 2002. She joked that if she ever fell on hard times, she could always get a skin graft and sell it, saying: ‘I mean, it’s an original Freud. I wonder how much a collector would pay for that? A few million?’

3 …Or even £3.9million, which is what Freud’s painting of Kate reclining while pregnant with her daughter, Lila Grace, fetched in 2005, when it went under the hammer at Christie’s. The portrait, which was sold to an anonymous buyer, took nine months to complete, with the model dutifully sitting in Freud’s home from 7am to 2am seven nights a week. Freud doesn’t just paint anyone: he declined to paint Princess Diana, saying that he couldn’t get past her ‘sheen of glamour’.

4 A keen art collector, she’s reported to own works by Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Marc Quinn, Gary Hume, the Chapman brothers and Banksy.

5 In 2013, Vogue reported that her favourite cocktail was the Twinkle — champagne, elderflower cordial, a dash of vodka and a lemon twist. These days, she’s teetotal, having giving up alcohol in 2017.

6 At the height of her partying days, her friends affectionately called her The Tank for her prodigious drinking ability and stamina.

7 Although Naomi Campbell preferred to call her The Wagon — not, as some assumed, because she was permanently falling off it. According to Campbell, the nickname was first coined by Bono’s wife, Ali Hewson, who called Kate ‘little wagon’ after meeting her in Ireland.

8 Kate called her ex-husband Jamie Hince ‘The Vicar’ because he tried to keep her off the cigarettes and booze.

9 Hince, guitarist for The Kills, proposed to Kate daily after they came back from holiday in Thailand in 2011. She finally accepted while watching C4’s reality TV series My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding. ‘I was just watching Jamie, so cute, and I was like, these girls, they just spend their whole life waiting for that day — let’s do it!’ she told American Vogue.

10 She paid for her own diamond engagement ring, a design inspired by Zelda Fitzgerald, the party-girl wife of Great Gatsby author F. Scott Fitzgerald.

11 She loves flying, and never travels without a £2,440 Hermes yak wool cashmere blanket and a passport holder filled with family photos. ‘I always go to sleep on the plane,’ she said in a 2015 interview.

12 Well, not always. In June of the same year, she caused a fracas on an easyJet flight from Turkey to London after becoming irate that the cabin crew had run out of sandwiches. Returning from a gruelling detox at The LifeCo in Bodrum, it’s believed she was ‘hangry’ — hungry and angry — at having her first opportunity to eat denied her.

13 The phrase ‘basic bitch’ was popularised by Kate: she is alleged to have called one of the cabin crew this on the same flight.

14 In 1999 she had two cameos in Blackadder, appearing as Maid Marian and as a fictional Queen of England.

15 In a 2006 stage version of Little Britain in aid of Comic Relief, Kate appeared as Matt Lucas’s obnoxious TV character Vicky Pollard’s sister Katie.

16 She makes plum jam from fruit grown on her Cotswold estate — and even set up her own jam stall at Glastonbury in 2015.

17 The most expensive thing for sale on her wellbeing website Cosmoss is Sacred Mist, described as ‘fragrance for soul, self, space’. A 100ml bottle costs £125.

18 She also sells tea bags for £20, only these aren’t just tea bags, they’re blended exclusively by an alchemist, apparently, and to be enjoyed as part of a special Dawn Ritual.

19 Most people remember Kate for her range with Topshop, launched in 2007. Fewer recall her collaboration with Spanish chain Mango; a joint one with fellow supermodel Cara Delevingne, in 2015.

20 WHEN the Topshop collection launched, industry gossips carped about how ‘lazy’ it was that Moss’s design philosophy was simply to adapt favourite items from her own wardrobe. This is now a standard approach among celebrities — but Kate did it first.

21 Of her highly successful 14-season collection for Topshop, the bestselling item of all was a one-shouldered lemon tea dress, left.

22 In 2005, she surprised everyone by not just appearing in a TV ad for Virgin Mobile, but also speaking, something she had always refused to do. The deal reportedly earned her £1.2 million.

23 One of the few other times she’s spoken in public was in 2022, when she testified in the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard defamation trial, beaming into the court in Virginia by video from her Gloucestershire home. She dispelled a rumour that Depp had pushed her down a flight of steps when he was her boyfriend in the 1990s.

24 While some of her beauty secrets are expensive, her favourite hairbrush is a Mason Pearson nylon N4 Pocket brush, £36 — in baby pink or baby blue so that she can find them in her bag.

25 She used to live next door to George Michael in North London: so close were the two that Moss would sometimes climb from garden to garden over the walls with a ladder.

26 She is not merely the face of Diet Coke — she’s also the brand’s creative director.

27 She does the gardening in £170 Chelsea boots.

28 …using a nine-litre Spear & Jackson watering can from the Yorkshire brand’s Kew Gardens collection (£40.99).

29 She has the pick of the world’s finest fragrances, but one of her favourites is the relatively affordable Acqua di Rose (£33) by the venerable Florentine pharmacy Santa Maria Novella (est 1221), which she likes to apply to her face and body after a shower.

30 She is fiercely loyal to her glam squad, and has been having her blonde hair tended to by the same colourist, Nicola Clarke, for decades.

31 Her go-to hairdressers are her friends Sam McKnight and James Brown.

32 Like many of us, her favourite comfort food is mashed potato — only hers is with sour cream and Princesse d’Isenbourg caviar.

33 One of her favourite books is the feminist bestseller Women Who Run With The Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes.

34 She achieves her famous ‘smoky leg’ look with £35 Wolford ‘Individual 10’ nylon tights.

35 KATE is good friends with the artist Jake Chapman, who with his brother Dinos earned the nickname ‘The Brothers Grim’ for their controversial output in the 1990s.

36 She’s also best friends with Chapman’s wife, model and nutritionist Rosemary Ferguson.

37 Ferguson’s daughters, Elfie and Bliss, are signed to Kate Moss’s eponymous modelling agency — as is Kate’s 21 year old daughter Lila.

38 Kate may have appeared on the cover of countless magazines but, in 2010, she also appeared on the cover of Bryan Ferry’s album, Olympia.

39 She opined in an interview that a quote attributed to her, ‘nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’, was taken out context, adding: ‘I think I was a scapegoat for a lot of people’s problems. I was never anorexic, I never have been.’

40 She’s familiar with being on best-dressed lists, but in 2008 she appeared on a worst-dressed list — by animal rights group Peta for wearing fur.

41 In 2002 she duetted with her friend, Bobby Gillespie from rock band Primal Scream, on Some Velvet Morning, the 1967 song by Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra. Despite receiving heavy airplay on radio, it only made it to No 44 in the UK charts.

42 Her relationship with troubled musician Pete Doherty is well documented: less so were her contributions to his albums. Of the 12 songs on his band Babyshambles’ second album, Shotter’s Nation, four feature Kate’s vocals, and credit her as a co-writer.

43 In a recent TV documentary with Louis Theroux, Doherty revealed that one of his pet icks about Kate when they dated between 2005 and 2007 was how she would order Coca-Cola via her assistant. ‘I learnt Donald Trump does the same thing, and it put me off a bit,’ he added.

44 She has DJed at a number of events including at a Miu Miu party in 2017.

45 As befits one of the most famous supermodels of all time, she’s had a slew of products named after her (including Saint Laurent’s Kate bag, far left), most recently a pink-toned lipstick, Nude Kate, above, created by her longtime friend Charlotte Tilbury. ‘I take it everywhere,’ she says.

46 She is unusually small for a catwalk model, with a height of around 5ft 6in.

47 She’s also unusually generous, with her friend, the hairdresser James Brown, once telling me that she frequently donated to charities, but preferred to keep her largesse a private matter.

48 She’s the world’s most prolific Vogue cover girl, appearing on the cover of British Vogue 44 times, as well as notching up 16 Paris covers and five American.

49 As of 2022, she had a net worth of $70 million.

50 In 2000, she briefly retired from modelling, allegedly calling her agency, Storm, to say she was quitting. ‘I didn’t want to say ‘I’m a model’ ever’ again,’ she told Time Out.