Liz Hurley sucks to stop smoking

British Medical Journal, August 5, 2000 by Ron Davis

During a recent photography shoot for a cosmetics advertisement on the Caribbean island of St Bartholomew, actress and model Liz Hurley was caught by paparazzi sunbathing topless--and sucking on a baby's pink dummy.

It emerged that the dummy was Ms Hurley's latest method for giving up the half a pack of Marlboro Lights she smokes each day. A spokeswoman for Ms Hurley explained that nicotine patches did not seem to work for her. The idea for the dummy, she said, came from Desmond Morris's book Manwatching, which "equated smoking with a baby's desire to be breast fed."

Mr Morris was pleased to hear that Ms Hurley had taken his advice: "Only someone like Liz, whom I've never met, could make something like a dummy look chic and trendy. As far as I know she's the only person to have taken up my idea to suck on a dummy to fight the urge to light up."

Actor Hugh Grant, Ms Hurley's former boyfriend, confirmed that she was an addicted smoker. "Elizabeth smokes four thousand cigarettes a day. I've caught her with cigarettes in her nostrils," he told Esquire magazine last September.