From magazine covers to motherhood - Rosanna Davison celebrates 20 years as Ireland's top model

Milestone anniversary for crooner Chris de Burgh's famous daughter who won Miss World in December 2003

Today marks 20 years since Rosanna Davison was crowned Miss World. On December 6, 2003, she became the first — and only — Irish beauty queen to bring home the famous tiara.

She may have already been used to the celebrity world as the daughter of one of Ireland’s most successful singers, Chris De Burgh — but winning Miss World changed the then 19-year-old UCD student’s life forever, catapulting her into a lifestyle of fame and glamour.

What was said

Rosanna said: “I have fantastic memories of the night. They are still so clear in my head.

“I remember when my name, or at least Miss Ireland was called out, I remember my dad punching the air and my mom jumping around with excitement. “I’ve really happy memories of the night and just so much gratitude for the opportunities that Miss World gave me.

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“I never imagined that I would still be here 20 years later doing things like Dancing With The Stars. It gave me a career, an experience, opportunities beyond my wildest dreams. “It literally changed my life. I’m really thankful for the experience and being part of Miss World. I travelled the world, I’m very grateful it gave me this amazing 20 years.”

Life and times

From being the first Irish woman to bare all for Playboy, to getting married, reinventing herself as a health guru, having babies and writing a book about her fertility struggles, here’s some of Rosanna’s biggest moments in the past two decades.

WINNING MISS WORLD: Her world-famous dad Chris De Burgh wrote For Rosanna — from 1986 album Into The Light — for his only daughter. So the girl from Enniskerry, Co Wicklow, was always destined for the spotlight. But Rosanna’s success was in her own right after she was spotted by a talent scout in Dublin and urged to enter Miss Ireland. She travelled to Sanya, China, where she beat 106 contestants to win Miss World on December 6, 2003 sparking her modelling career.

POSING FOR PLAYBOY: Rosanna defied expectations when she stripped off for an exotic Playboy cover beach shoot on the island of Mauritius. She was the cover girl in the October 2012 edition of German Playboy – the first Irish woman to bare all for the famous mag. Boyfriend Wes Quirke told her to go for it and dad Chris reminded her she’d be keeping company with icons like Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell and Marilyn Monroe.

By 2013, Rosanna was watching Charlie Chaplin movies with Hugh Hefner at his Playboy Mansion as he tried to convince her to pose for Playboy USA. In the end, Hefner picked shots from her Mauritius shoot and Rosanna made history as the first Miss World to appear in Playboy USA.

ROMANCE AND MARRIAGE: Smitten Wes — son of arcade mogul Richard Quirke — messaged Rosanna on Bebo after she went for a spray tan at his cousin’s Dublin salon in 2006. They chatted online and met six weeks later with pals at a nightclub. Wes popped the question in Mauritius before Christmas 2012 — with a €40k ring he designed himself.

The couple walked up the aisle in May 2014 at a glitzy Powerscourt Hotel wedding in Wicklow, where superstar Hozier provided the music.

BABIES: Rosanna is now a busy mother to three children all under four. But it was a tough journey to get there.

She suffered 14 miscarriages since the couple started trying for a baby in 2015 and finally welcomed daughter Sophia via gestational surrogate in November 2019. In spring of 2020, Rosanna told how she’d fallen pregnant naturally and twins boys Hugo and Oscar arrived that October.

The model opened up about her fertility journey in her 2021 book When Dreams Come True: The Heartbreak and Hope on My Journey to Motherhood to help others battling infertility.

UKRAINIAN SURROGATE MOVES TO IRELAND: In April 2022, as the war raged in Ukraine, Rosanna invited her Ukrainian surrogate Anastasia Berezan and her family to stay with them in Ireland.

Rosanna had kept in touch with Anastasia since she gave birth to Sophia in Kyiv and was “demented” with worry hearing bombs go off in the background when she spoke with her. So she opened her home to the young family, saying: “She gave us the greatest gift of all and now it was our time to help her.”

VEGAN/HEALTH BUSINESS: By 2013, Rosanna – a vegetarian for years — had turned vegan and posed naked on a bed of red chilis in an ad to promote PETA with the slogan ‘Being Vegan is Red Hot’.

She trained as a nutritional therapist before reinventing herself as a health guru, sharing her secrets in her bestselling plant-based eating bible Eat Yourself Beautiful in 2015. She kept at her studies and in 2019 she graduated with an MSc in personalised nutrition.

DANCING WITH THE STARS: Rosanna is taking to the dancefloor in the New Year as a contestant in DWTS.

She said: “My family likes to say that I’m ‘awkwardly uncool’ when I’m on the dancefloor, so I’m going to show them a thing or two.

“You forget who you used to be when you become a mum. Your children take over your life. I’m doing this show for my kids as well, I want them to be really proud.”

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