Considered one of the world's most beautiful women, supermodel Cindy Crawford has appeared just about everywhere that advertisements are allowed. Over her unprecedentedly long career, she has hawked everything from haute couture and perfume to soda pop and dairy products, and has made a fortune with her beauty and fitness videos and swimsuit calendars. Crawford also owns a piece of the Planet Hollywood restaurant chain. In 1995, Forbes magazine ranked her as the most highly paid model in the world. Crawford is the first supermodel to pose for Playboy and later risked her career by posing suggestively on the cover of Vanity Fair beside lesbian singer k.d. Lang. In addition to appearing in television commercials, Crawford spent six years hosting the MTV cable network's House of Style. She is an intelligent, witty woman and a popular talk show guest. As an actress, Crawford occasionally guest stars on television series, as she did in a special 1998 episode of the NBC sitcom Third Rock From the Sun. In 1995, Crawford made a rather inauspicious film debut in the action thriller Fair Game. Despite the film's lack of box-office success, Crawford is still interested in pursuing an acting career.Crawford is a native of De Kalb, IL, and was discovered as a teenager when a local news photographer took a picture of her while she was detasselling corn. Already an impressive beauty, she left her country job to become a model for the summer. She continued modelling for the next two summers, through the Chicago division of the Elite modelling agency and then decided to go to college. Helped by an academic scholarship (she'd been a straight-A student in high school), Crawford studied chemical engineering at Northwestern University, but shrewdly decided that she'd make more money as a model. For a while, Crawford worked in Chicago, but didn't hit the big time until she moved to New York City in 1986.