Sue Tilley is an author and model, as well as manager at the Department for Work and Pensions in London’s West End. Her book, Leigh Bowery: The Life and Times of an Icon, is the authoritative biography of one of the most avant-garde performing artists of the 1980s.
Born in 1957 in Wimbledon, South London, Tilley attended school in London and Surrey before moving to Hertfordshire to study at St. Albans Girls’ Grammar School. She claims to have been an average student, though she excelled at some subjects. During her teenage years, she spent a lot of time attending concerts at the St. Albans Civic Centre. Tilley then studied to be an art teacher at Wall Hall College of Education—until, at twenty-one, she traded college life for the excitement of the newly emerging modern-art subculture in London. Since childhood she had known that she wanted to do “something arty,” and working a full-time day job provided her the opportunity to take part in the art world by night.
In 1982, Tilley met Leigh Bowery, who was quickly becoming one of London’s most notorious performance artists, and their friendship developed immediately. She spent much time with Bowery in his nightclub, Taboo, and was fictionalized in the 2002 musical Taboo as a character named Big Sue. With music written by Boy George, Taboo debuted at London’s West End and one year later on Broadway. In 1990, Bowery introduced Tilley to painter Lucian Freud. Over four years in the early 1990s, Tilley posed nude for Freud and, in 2008, one of his portraits of her sold for $34 million at Christie’s Fine Arts Auction House in New York City, making it the most expensive painting by a living artist ever sold.
Tilley has continued to “combine more glamorous endeavors” with her daytime job at the Department for Work and Pensions. Most recently she has been a judge on Britain’s Next Top Tranny in London. In her spare time she enjoys watching reality television, traveling, and baking.