Earlier this week [8-24-07], reports surfaced that Tyra Banks has split with her manager, Benny Medina. Good guy or bad guy, over the last seven years together, they built an incredible brand that is Tyra Banks.

Say what you will about Tyra Banks as a TV host, reality-show judge, recording artist, or humanitarian. One thing is for sure: She is smokin’ hot and whip smart.

Being smokin’ hot is how she used to make her living, really. As a supermodel, it’s a prerequisite.

Now, she’s using her considerable brain power and business savvy to distinguish herself beyond her supermodel past.

Tyra Banks has appeared on the covers of countless magazines, making history by becoming the first African-American woman to be featured on the cover of GQ, the Victoria’s Secret catalog, and the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue and calendar. Countless men devote countless hours to staring at her photos in magazines or the internet, as she continues to rate in the top 10 most searched personalities online.

Banks always had ambitions beyond just modeling, however. She appeared in several episodes of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air in 1993 and went on to do guest spots on other TV shows, including Just Shoot Me and Felicity. She co-starred in several lousy movies, too: Love Stinks, Coyote Ugly, and Halloween-Resurrection, none of which should be watched without close friends and couple glasses of wine.

Savvy businesswoman that she is, she rode the wave of a great idea with America’s Next Top Model, a reality show that premiered on UPN in 2003 and promptly received the young network’s highest ratings ever. Banks is the show’s host and main judge, as well as one of its executive producers.

Tyra parlayed the success of that Top Model into her own talk show in 2005, where with grace, wit and humility, entertains a wide range of guests, some famous some not, on topics ranging from movie releases to breast cancer. The main thrust of the show features “regular people” and their “regular issues” — like Oprah, only, you know, hotter.

Banks made news in early 2007 when she re-created her 1997 Sports Illustrated swimsuit photo shoot — complete with a bikini that demonstrated how much larger her body had gotten since then. She told People magazine that she’s 30 pounds heavier now than she was in 1997, but that she feels comfortable with her body and no longer wishes to (or has to) starve herself to succeed. With her talk show aimed at ordinary American women, it seems only right that she’s not so supermodel thin that ordinary women can’t relate to her.

Tyra Banks is a breath of fresh air. While many of her supermodel colleagues have  haughty, diva-like, self-important dispositions, she is the opposite of those things. Her work with TZONE helps empower young girls, and her reality show, America’s Top Model launches careers. It’s also a blast to watch.

And unlike many of her peers, she has genuine talent beyond the runway — she hasn’t modeled since 2005 — and is more successful now than at any point in her career. Tyra backs up her ideas about being a good global citizen with deeds and has a far broader appeal that cuts across gender lines and skews far younger than Oprah. And did we mention she’s smokin’ hot?

Nasanji Parker for
http://www.SuperModelCalendars.com

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