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British bombshell, Victoria's Secret agent and the decade's first single-monikered supermodel: the camera loves Rosie Huntington-Whiteley.

Fleetwood Mac's "Big Love"is playing loud on the studio iPod dock as Rosie Huntington-Whiteley gets ready for her final close-up of the day.

The soft-rocking classic in the background builds to its libidinous climax, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham exchanging their animalistic "uhs" and "ahs" over a thrumming beat, providing a perfect soundtrack to the action under the arc lights as our 22-year-old angel arches her back and showboats her backside.  

Rosie Alice Huntington-W, name seemingly stolen from an AA Milne poem, body straight off a grease monkey's calendar, has a quite spectacular mouth. The mouth isn't just full, it is overflowing to the point of vulgarity. And her devastating lips are so gorgeously engorged they could suck the gold plate off a truckstop crucifix in one, greedy slurp.

Photographer Ellen von Unwerth has ordered the owner of these lips to make model-love to a vintage Sony video camera. The lips lick and kiss at the lens while hands, slender and St Barths-bronzed, caress its record button as if searching for a G-spot.

Inanimate object now seduced and requesting a cigarette, Devon-raised Rosie moves on to an icy-white leather couch. As she walks across the room, strutting runway style, she shows off the kind of legs that are built for six-inch heels and very little else, legs that just keep right on at you.

Nicely spoken and well-mannered but so rude to look at, she has a head of Vargas-girl hair that is long and full. The Tavistock beauty with a Brazilian booty has breasts that are perfect, small andal dente. And, but for a pair of high-cut boy shorts and a faux-fur throw, she is naked as a cooler-box nectarine.

She wasn't always so confident around strangers. In fact, like pretty much every supermodel, the young Rosie thought she was an ugly duckling. "I was the shortest kid in my year," she says. "I was teased because I had no breasts and huge lips. And because of my double-barrelled name, people thought I was super p-o-s-h, which is actually not the case."

So, tomboy Rosie made her own entertainment. "To us it was a real luxury to have a video night. Mostly, we were just told to go out and play. It was a quite a big deal when we actually got a film to watch at home. We would spend a lot of time sitting around in fields... looking at the view." Or "hanging out in the town square in the cold and wet, smoking cigarettes".

Rosie rode horses, went to the pub and the local disco, necked pints of ASBO-strength White Lightning and Scrumpy Jack cider with the boys. At school she was, at her own admission, "an outrageous flirt". She got voted Miss Big Mouth ("because I talked constantly") and, after a growth spurt at the age of 13, Girl Most Likely To Become A Supermodel.

At home her bedroom walls were plastered with photographs of models such as Kate Moss , Naomi Campbell and Natalia Vodianova, and she dreamed of big-city glamour. "But it didn't really enter my mind to be a model. Those girls just didn't seem real to me." Farm life, she says, "was pretty boring and I was itching to get out. I knew I always wanted to go to London."

She got her first big break in front of the camera at 16, posing for a Levi's commercial. "I thought that would be the one and only time I would ever get paid for modelling so I spent all of my first cheque on a Ford Ka, even though I couldn't drive."

• Published 25 May 2011
• Online editing by Oliver Franklin
• Photo Credit: Ellen Von Unwerth

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