Lisa Lyon in Paris in 1980.

Lisa Lyon in Paris in 1980.Credit:Getty

Through her pictures and performances,she said,she hoped to champion a strong yet graceful new standard of beauty,one in which a woman’s body was “neither masculine nor feminine,but feline”.

Lyon never entered another bodybuilding competition after winning her world title. But for a few years in the early 1980s,she was an eloquent and inescapable spokeswoman for the sport,helping to demonstrate that weightlifting was for women,not just men.

She served as a bodybuilding commentator for NBC,was interviewed by talk-show hosts Merv Griffin and Phil Donahue,performed in Paris,Munich and Stockholm,and was featured in magazines includingVogue andEsquire.

Lisa Lyon admires her physique during a workout in Gold’s Gym in Santa Monica in 1979.

Lisa Lyon admires her physique during a workout in Gold’s Gym in Santa Monica in 1979.Credit:AP

She also posed forPlayboy in 1980,later tellingThe Washington Post that she had grown tired of appearing in muscle magazines and wanted to introducePlayboy’s readers to a different kind of femininity.

“In the ’50s you had women like Marilyn Monroe who were strictly sex objects,” she said. “In the ’60s you had Twiggy,who started the undernourished,androgynous style. In the ’70s there was Farrah[Fawcett]. Now,in the ’80s,health is a reality. Women are building up their bodies without sacrificing beauty or femininity.”

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Her inspiration was Schwarzenegger,who would later elevate the sport’s popularity as a star of the documentaryPumping Iron. A meeting with Schwarzenegger led Lyon to Gold’s Gym,the centre of the American bodybuilding scene (the gym was then located in Santa Monica,California),where she began working out six days a week.

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“A lot of the men bodybuilders there resented being invaded by a woman,” she told The Post in 1981. “They thought I’d be in the way,and they thought I wasn’t serious. Some,I’m sure,thought I was there to pick up guys,not weights. And some just wanted to watch me in a sexual way.”

But in time “they became very helpful,” she added,if a little jealous when photographers and television crews arrived to document her workouts.

Lyon studied ballet,flamenco and jazz dance before enrolling at UCLA. She received a bachelor’s degree in ethnic arts and interdisciplinary studies in 1974.

Following her success in bodybuilding,she published an instructional book,Lisa Lyon’s Body Magic (1981),with writer and photographer Douglas Kent Hall. She also acted in a few films,including as a vampire in the horror comedyVamp (1986),with Grace Jones,and worked in Japan,where she became a fixture of advertising campaigns for The Seibu Department Stores.

Lyon’s first,early marriage was to Richard Keeling,an ethnomusicologist who pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter in the 1975 death of singer-songwriter Tim Buckley. Authorities said that Keeling offered heroin to Buckley,who snorted what he believed to be cocaine and died of an overdose.

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That marriage ended in divorce,as did her second,to French singer-songwriter Bernard Lavilliers. Lyon’s death from cancer,at her home in Westlake Village,California,was confirmed by her sister,who is among her immediate survivors.

In 2000,Lyon was inducted into the International Fitness and Bodybuilding Federation Hall of Fame,which credited her with “elevating bodybuilding to the level of fine art.” The sport had transformed her self-image,she once toldThe Baltimore Sun.

The Washington Post

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