Toyah Willcox: The Punk Princess Who Came From Kings Heath

She was born with a twisted spine, a clubbed foot, no hip sockets, and one leg two inches shorter than the other. Her mother did physiotherapy with her every single day. She grew up to become one of Britain's most iconic rock performers, a film star alongside Laurence Olivier and Katharine Hepburn, and the undisputed first name on the Kings Heath Walk of Fame. Toyah Willcox was born on 18 May 1958 in Kings Heath, and the neighbourhood made her every bit as much as she made it.

Her father, Beric Willcox, ran a successful joinery business with three factories. Her mother, Barbara Joy, had been a professional dancer — her father had fallen in love with her after watching her perform on stage in a variety act with Flanagan and Allen. It was a creative household, and Toyah absorbed all of it. Before she was fourteen she had seen Marc Bolan, David Bowie, Mott the Hoople, Black Sabbath and Hawkwind live — admittedly, she later confessed, by lying about her age everywhere she went.

She attended a private girls' school but was bullied relentlessly and struggled with undiagnosed dyslexia. She was, she later said, "the child from hell." She sat her O-levels a year late due to corrective surgery on her feet, and passed just one — music. It was, in retrospect, the only one that mattered. She went on to the Old Rep Drama School in Birmingham, got her first professional stage role at the National Theatre in London, and then director Derek Jarman — who would become like a surrogate father to her — cast her in the seminal 1978 punk film Jubilee, alongside Siouxsie Sioux and Adam Ant. A year later she played Monkey in the film of The Who's Quadrophenia, filming part of it while seriously ill with pneumonia.

All the while she was fronting her own band. Between 1977 and 1983, Toyah's hits — It's a Mystery, Thunder in the Mountains, I Want to Be Free — filled the charts. Her platinum album Anthem sold in enormous numbers. She was nominated for Best Female Artist at the Brit Awards three years running. Ten million people watched her live Christmas Eve concert broadcast on BBC2 in 1981. She later worked opposite Laurence Olivier on The Ebony Tower, becoming something of a confidante to the ageing, dying great actor. Katharine Hepburn, upon meeting her, couldn't stop running her fingers through Toyah's famously orange hair.

In 2012, Toyah returned to Kings Heath to accept the first ever star on the Kings Heath Walk of Fame — the honour going to the girl who, by rights, shouldn't have been able to walk at all. She is now married to Robert Fripp, founder and guitarist of King Crimson. The physio never stopped. She never stopped either.