Early years

Rachel was born in September 1969 in New Zealand's city of Auckland. She was a talented kid and loved to dance and act but her dancing plans were smashed when she found out that she has a blood disease that disables her from intensive physical activities.

Professional life

After she lost the possibility to be a professional dancer, she turned to modeling. When she was 17 years old, she had photo shootings and appeared on the covers of Australian Harper's Bazaar and Vogue. This launched her into the limelight and she did numerous campaigns in Australia and native New Zealand. Ford Models scouts noticed her then and signed her for Ford and this was the beginning of a very successful career. In no time she became Cover Girl model and spokesperson for their cosmetics. In 1989 she did incredibly successful Sports Illustrated shooting-it is already well known that Sports Illustrated models always caught a lot of attention, right?! After Sports Illustrated, came covers of 1994 Cosmopolitan and another Sports Illustrated Swimsuit cover (Sports Illustrated called her once again for the swimsuit edition, 12 years later, in 2006), Vogue in Italy, Australia and USA, Elle and Harper's Bazaar in Netherlands.

In 2004 Rachel decided to play it more adventurous and posed naked for Playboy cover.

After about a decade of successful modeling and these famous covers, Rachel was ready for some movie career. She first appeared on television in 1997, in an episode of The Drew Carey Show. Her movie roles include A walk in a park (1999), Two shades of blue (2000), La cucina (2000), The vicar of Dibley (2004), Lingo (2005), The benchwarmers (2006), Confessions of a go-go girl (2008), The perfect assistant (2008), Piranhaconda (2011), and finally in 2012, Swamp volcano.

Besides her movie roles, she is also a successful TV host. Just this year, she started her own TV project called "Rachel Hunter's tour of beauty" which is discovering different ideas about beauty in countries around the world.

Private life

At the end of 1980s Hunter had a relationship and lived with Kip Winger, rock musician. When she was 21, she met Rod Stewart, whom she married in December 1990, despite the fact that he as was her 24 years senior. She had two children with him, Liam and Renee. They separated in 1999 and completed divorce in 2006. Shortly after completing the divorce, Rachel started a relationship with hockey player Jarret Stoll, 13 years younger then her. They got engaged and made plans to marry in the summer of 2009, but the plans for marriage were canceled just few weeks before the wedding.  After this shock, she devoted herself to work and kids, but says that she is ready for new relationship now that kids have became independent and started their own lives.