Kathleen Humberstone

By Denise Humberstone (UK, mum of 3, blogger at troynize.com)

This young woman has packed more into her twenty-two years than most of us do in a lifetime! A successful model who also recently took up acting, Kathleen gave a speech at the United Nations at seventeen. She certainly lives up to two of her nicknames: Chatterbox and Fashion Diva!

The odds of Kathleen being conceived were all against her. It took a French woman (who had lived all over the world) and a British man (who grew up in South Africa) to meet at their then work place (automotive industry-related) in Kuwait! They fell in love and… Kathleen was born in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, of course! Her sister followed suit three years later, which is when the family moved to Dubai. Her brother completed the family the following year. Fate then sent us to India, although everything was packed and sorted for Italy! The three-year planned stay there abruptly shrank into three months, and the family was called to China this time. For three years… which turned into just one (don’t ask!). And that is when the family landed in the UK, yet another completely different country, climate, and culture. Amazingly, we have stayed put since! Not that moving would be a problem for Kathleen. She’s always been the one who adapted the fastest out of all of us, to a new home, a new language, a new school, new people, new weather… I can’t believe I shed so many tears and stayed awake so many nights, worrying about how she would cope each time we had to move. The truth is, she has just always taken everything in her stride as long as she had her main pillars in the picture: her immediate family. It became very clear from the start that Kathleen is what is called “a communicator”: eager to please with an unquenchable thirst to learn, aptitude to absorb and ready to try just about anything! Although extremely vocal but non-verbal until about four, she was able to communicate using approximately a hundred signs that I had taught her from when she was eighteen months and even came up with a couple of her own (for seatbelt and handbag!). Those signs turned out to be a great bridge between English and French and proved even more useful when she started to read as although she recognised the written words and couldn’t yet say them, she could sign them! She sadly, but naturally, dropped the signs as her spoken language progressed. We are now learning Makaton for Kathleen’s benefit as it is likely that given her hearing impairment, Kathleen will eventually need it at some point in her life. Better be proactive! At the age of seventeen, Kathleen somehow got the amazing opportunity to be a guest speaker at the United Nations. It was around the time Kathleen was brutally exposed to Non-Invasive Prenatal Testing (NIPT) while listening to the radio and when I had to bring her up to speed – an extremely delicate topic to navigate, as you can well imagine. Kathleen was allowed five minutes at the United Na-

tions. So I asked her what she would like to say and tried my best to put it in writing using most of her words. She smashed it on the day and again a few months later in Spain! When Kathleen was nearly eighteen, she expressed a strong desire to become a model, which didn’t come as a surprise given her natural love of the camera and propensity for daily catwalks in the kitchen! And as always, she expected me to facilitate this. I tried. And failed. Even just five years ago, representation of people with a disability in the media was still quite rare, never mind a visible learning disability! The online registration process of mainstream agencies made it impossible for people like Kathleen even to be considered. Until I stumbled upon Zebedee online, an agency specialising in disability and differences representation. They’d only just recently set up shop. I applied for Kathleen, and she was signed up shortly after. We’ve never looked back!

Ange Harper Photography Ange Harper Photography

Surprisingly, 2020 was her busiest year ever!

Kathleen has had incredible opportunities since then and her confidence, which certainly didn’t need any boost, grew exponentially: she’s modelled for River Island quite a few times, travelled to France to model for Tommy Hilfiger, worked at Fund Fair for supermodel Natalia Vodianova’s charity Naked Heart Foundation, was featured in Elle UK magazine as one of their 50 International GameChangers of 2020, walked at the London Fashion Week a few times and took part in wonderful awareness campaigns (Kintsugi, I am a Marvel, World Down Syndrome Day, International Women’s Day), and so much more… Surprisingly, 2020 was her busiest year ever! She has recently enjoyed appearing in ITV’s Unforgotten and BBC’s Line of Duty TV series. She is also one of the main characters in one episode of a new ITV crime drama called Professor T with actor @patheticgirl63 Ben Miller, a series which will air before the end of the year. She enjoys making the occasional video for MENCAP charity and loves giving talks about her life to midwives (organised by Down’s Syndrome Association for their Tell it Right campaign). When she is not busy modelling, Kathleen watches Friends on TV (she knows every story, every character’s name and actors’ real names!) or fills in notepad after notepad with what she watches on YouTube. She is a lot more switched on than we are when it comes to celebrities! She is also keen on exercising and obtained her very first medal when in 2019, she took part and completed the first quarter of the Thames Path Challenge: a 28.5km non-stop walk in nine very long hours, for which she trained for four months.

Photographer: Murat Ozkasim Apart from dreaming about walking fashion runways around the globe and modelling for Victoria’s Secret and Victoria Beckham, she is keen on To follow Kathleen: Facebook: Kathleen Humberstone Model Instagram: kathleenhumberstone Twitter: @KathleenHumber4 interviewing people and keeps asking me why I still haven’t arranged for her to interview Ellen DeGeneres, Michelle Obama, Oprah, Jimmy Fallon, Jennifer Aniston, and Reese Witherspoon! I’m fast running out of excuses now that lockdown is finished!

TikTok: kathleenhumberstone On a personal note, Kathleen is determined that at some point, she will marry her boyfriend of ten years, Jack. She says they won’t have children because it hurts too much, costs too much, and she doesn’t want to give up going to pubs and parties! Oh, and apparently, they’ll have a Chihuahua pet dog, and both will have a job and live in a nice house. Did I mention she was bossy and stubborn, or rather ambitious and strong-willed? There, she’s got it all sorted out… and keeps us on our toes in the meantime with her never-ending projects!

Ange Harper Photography

WARNING: Kathleen still can’t fathom why everybody wouldn’t be thrilled to listen to her talk and/or sing all day or what’s so bad with flirting shamelessly. So, I wholeheartedly apologise to our friends, neighbours, complete strangers, past, present and future…