Cindy Ann Crawford was born on February 20th, 1966 in DeKalb, Illinois. She is the second of three girls and 1 boy born to parents, John and Jennifer, now divorced. Cindy was eight years old when her younger brother, Jeff, died of leukemia at the age of four.

Her modeling career began while she was detasseling corn and a photographer from a local newspaper snapped her picture. The photo generated enough positive feedback to convince the exceptionally beautiful subject to quit her farm-labor job and spend the following two summers modeling.

Meanwhile the startling beauty won a chemical engineering scholarship, was Valedictorian of DeKalb High with a 4.0 average and scored perfectly on her college calculus exams. She enrolled at Northwestern University but soon realized that modeling was potentially more lucrative than a career in engineering and ditched college to model full-time for Chicago photographer Victor Screbneski. By 1986 she had made a name for herself in Chicago and moved to New York to make it really big.

Within two years of her move to the Big Apple, Cindy had become a bonified supermodel, gracing magazine covers, strutting down top runways, and earning top dollars. She became the fist modern supermodel to pose for Playboy in 1988 and caught the attention of executives at MTV, who subsequently hired her to host the network's fashion program, House of Style.

She made a smooth transition from the world of fashion into the broadcast journalism arena and hosted the show for six years. In 1995 she then began to host specials for the network which included behind-the scenes looks at everything from the White House to Melrose Place. Currently she is developing projects exclusively with ABC, the fist of which was the highly successful Sex with Cindy Crawford.

She is also an acclaimed producer, having been the driving force behind her successful Cindy Crawford/Shape Your Body workout, which she developed with renowned trainer Radu. The video sold over 2 million copies in the U.S. alone and spawned a follow-up video The Next Challenge, which has been equally successful.

Not only has she appeared on over 400 magazine covers across the globe, she has numerous film (Fair Game) and TV credits and is the author of Cindy Crawford's Basic Face, a make-up workbook published by Broadway Books. She also donates a great deal of time and energy to the Leukemia Society of America, in memory of her brother and is a supporter of breast cancer research.

She was married to actor Richard Gere in December of 1991 in Las Vegas. The couple split up shortly after their $30,000 ad in the Times of London in 1994, assuring the public that their union was secure. Since then, Cindy had married her long-time love, bar owner Rande Gerber. The pair welcomed their first child in June 1999.