'I tried to retire but it was too boring': PR supremo LYNNE FRANKS at 76 PR supremo LYNNE FRANKS – famous for being lampooned as Edina Monsoon in Ab Fab – has made it her life’s mission to bring us the Next Big Thing. And at 76, she’s just getting started, as Tanya Gold discovers By Tanya Gold For You Magazine Published: 07:01 EDT, 22 June 2024 | Updated: 07:01 EDT, 22 June 2024 e-mail View comments Lynne Franks lives in a wonky witch’s house with a green front door in Wincanton, Somerset, with a dog called Bear who thinks Franks is his mother. Bear stares at us intensely because, Franks says, ‘He insists on knowing what is going on all the time.
’ Bear is black and the cat, Tui , is white. Together they look like a monochrome floor, and when I tell her this she says, ‘So chic!’ Franks knows what is chic: she is a soothsayer who peers into the future. She invented modern PR in the 1970s and 80s so defiantly – she lived her products – that Jennifer Saunders satirised her as Edina in Absolutely Fabulous (we will get to that later).
Today, she looks wonderful at 76: round face, clear skin and purple hair, because she is in the transformation business. Wincanton, which is close to fashionable Bruton, is more fashionable now she is here. It is nicknamed ‘Lynncanton’.
Franks is a wanderer: she tried to retire but found it so boring she can’t even remember what she did with the time. She has lived in London , California , Majorca and Oxfordshire, finally s.
