Bettie Page was an American pin-up girl who took the art of the provocative pose to new heights, or possibly depths depending on one’s capacity to be scandalised, in the 1950s. In an age when such images were in their infancy, she posed in bikinis, leopard skins, skimpy see-through underwear, corsets and stockings; she brandished whips and was tied up in sadomasochistic poses; and as often as not she was photographed wearing nothing more than a pair of high heels.

With her raven-haired beauty and curvaceous figure she was the embodiment of every young man’s dream (and a great many older men’s too); a fantasy woman, a free spirit of unabashed sensuality with a beguiling smile and for many the ultimate sex goddess.

Perhaps her huge success lay in the fact that she could look coy and innocent and wholesome even with her clothes off. For many young men she would have been the first woman they had seen naked. She was one of the most photographed people of the 20th century, and her saucy, come-hither image adorned the walls of countless student halls, garages, locker rooms and barracks. Wearing a Santa Claus hat and nothing else, she was the subject of the then fledgeling Playboy’s celebrated centrefold in 1955. Hugh Hefner, the magazine’s creator, described it as a milestone. “She became in time an American icon, her winning smile and effervescent personality apparent in every pose,” he said.

Page was variously labelled Miss Pinup Girl of the World, Model of the Century and Queen of Curves — 36, 23, 36. She helped to set the stage for the sexual revolution of the 1960s and became the subject of songs, biographies, comics, documentaries, films and innumerable websites.

Looking back on her career, in a Playboy interview in 1998, Page said: “I never thought it was shameful. I felt normal. It’s just that it was much better than pounding a typewriter eight hours a day, which gets monotonous . . . God approves of nudity. Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, they were naked as jaybirds.”

Betty Mae Page — she later changed her first name to Bettie — was born one of six children to a poor family in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1923. They moved to Houston, Texas, and for a time Page was brought up in an orphanage after her father was jailed for stealing a police car. In her teens she acted in school plays and then studied drama in New York. She won a screen test at 20th Century Fox but it went badly when a producer, in time-honoured fashion, offered her a part in return for a sexual favour. She declined. “I didn’t like his looks,” she said later. “I wouldn’t have gone to bed with him anyway. He was a creep. He drove off in his big car and scolded me: ‘You’ll be sorry.’ I wasn’t.”

The tycoon and film-maker Howard Hughes was smitten with her and pursued her with similarly dubious offers which she also rebuffed. “I guess people will say I made a mistake,” she said. “But sex is part of love, and you shouldn’t go around doing it unless you are in love. I certainly didn’t.”

A chance encounter in 1947 with an amateur photographer while Page was walking along the beach at Coney Island in New York led to her first pin-up pictures which appeared in magazines such as Wink, Eyeful and Titter. Perhaps in desperation, she later allowed herself to be photographed by a cameraman and his sister who specialised in sadomasochism. They cut her hair into dark bangs that became her trademark and posed her in spiked heels and little else. They shot her with a gag in her mouth, being spanked across another girl’s knee and brandishing a whip. In one session she was tied up and spreadeagled between two trees.

The fetishistic pictures were too much for some politicians and churchmen and a congessional investigation was launched. Page retreated from the public eye, later saying that she had been hounded by federal agents who waved her nude photographs in her face. She also believed that at 34, her days as “the girl with the perfect figure” were almost over. She moved to Florida in 1957 and got married for a second time, having divorced her high-school sweetheart. Her second marriage also failed, as did a third, and she suffered a nervous breakdown. In 1959 she became a born-again Christian and worked for Billy Graham’s ministry. In 1979 she moved to southern California, where she quarrelled with her landlady and was committed to a mental hospital in San Bernardino for 20 months. Later she had another altercation with a landlord and was put under state supervision for eight years.

Page reappeared in public in December 2003 for Playboy’s 50th anniversary party, the only time in the past 40 years that she had allowed her picture to be taken other than by the police department. There followed two feature films about her life — Bettie Page: Dark Angel (2004), starring Paige Richards, and The Notorious Bettie Page (2005), starring Gretchen Mol. After years of obscurity, interest in her had been reawakened and there was recognition, of sorts, of her place in American popular culture.

Bettie Page, model, was born on April 22, 1923. She died on December 11, 2008, aged 85