LOS ANGELES: Bettie Page, the pin-up model whose seductive photographs in magazines titillated and outraged Americans in the 1950s, has died, her agent said. She was 85.

“With deep personal sadness I must announce that my dear friend and client Bettie Page passed away at 6:41pm PST this evening (0241 GMT Friday) in a Los Angeles hospital,” her agent Mark Roesler said on Thursday in a statement. Page suffered a heart attack nine days earlier and never regained consciousness.

“She captured the imagination of a generation of men and women with her free spirit and unabashed sensuality,” Roesler said.

Page, with shoulder-length jet-black hair and bangs, combined sweetness and sexuality in a series of now-legendary posters and photographs in the 1950s, including as one of the inaugural centrefolds in Hugh Heffner’s new magazine Playboy, which named her “the model of the century.” The nice-naughty image — a sweet and beguiling smile matched with a curvacious figure and Page’s propensity for burlesque films and bondage images — proved highly combustible on the eve of America’s sexual revolution.

In the late 1950s Page became one of the most photographed women in the world, and her popularity soared even as she left the limelight nearly half a century ago.

Page later said she was puzzled by her effect on pop culture.

“I have no idea why I’m the only model who has had so much fame so long after quitting work,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 2006.—AFP