More than two decades before Madonna finally admitted to going under the knife — albeit only after being branded “unrecognizable” at February’s Grammys — there was the Swiss-born New York socialite Jocelyn Wildenstein, aka “Catwoman”, “the Bride of Wildenstein” and “the poster child for plastic surgery gone wrong”.
Catapulted into the spotlight — and the pages of the world’s tabloids — in the late Nineties thanks to her bitter but record-breakingly lucrative $2.5 billion divorce, Wildenstein and her face soon became the story itself, certainly in the UK where dramatic cosmetic surgery was still relatively rare, even among the ranks of the ultra wealthy.