The million-dollar muse: Sue Tilley

Lucian Freud's nude portrait of Sue Tilley, Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, became the most expensive painting by a living artist, going under the hammer in May for $33.6m
Sue Tilley in Lucian Freud's portrait, Benefits Supervisor
Sue Tilley in Lucian Freud's portrait, Benefits Supervisor Sleeping AP

It's been an interesting year, says Sue Tilley, but then "things always just happen to me. And it's not like when I was a child, I was thinking, oh yeah, one day I'd like to be in the most expensive painting in the world, is it?"

True, but when Lucian Freud's Benefits Supervisor Sleeping was sold at Christie's in New York in May for $33.6m (£17.2m), it happened anyway. Tilley, now a benefits manager at a job centre in central London, posed for a series of portraits for Freud in the mid-90s, having been introduced to him by her friend Leigh Bowery, and the sale - reportedly to Roman Abramovich - broke the record for the most expensive work by a living artist.

"I had all these weird people turning up from all over the world. On the actual day the painting sold, it was completely mad. I was in such a muddle. I was all by myself and I didn't know what to do. I asked Christie's for help and they just said, it's up to you. They didn't even tell me it was for sale. It wasn't until the Evening Standard turned up at the job centre and told me that I even found out."

She didn't go to the sale because "Christie's didn't invite me and I'd never turn up somewhere where I'm not wanted, I'd be mortified". Instead the world's media camped out on her doorstep. "I turned down a lot of stuff. The Sunday Mirror offered me £500 to strip naked. Yeah, right. Oh, and they said, they'd 'send a car for me'. Thanks! I think they thought I was some thick job centre girl who'd think it'd be worth it for £500. They didn't know about my bizarre double life."

Tilley's bizarre double life is quite extraordinary. She started working at Camden job centre in her early twenties, made a friend there who took her out clubbing, and within a few weeks she'd met Leigh Bowery. He was just "a London boy" at the time but he became the founder of "London's Studio 54", the club Taboo, as well as a performance artist, fashion designer, pop star and model for Freud, and Tilley says that knowing him changed her life. "He'd have been jealous about the painting. It'd all have been down to him, of course. But then, to be honest, it was, really."

She wrote Bowery's biography after he died of Aids in 1994, and "the funny thing is that Hello! did an interview with me after the sale where they photographed me in a frumpy dress looking like an old woman in some house they hired in Kilburn and a film director read it on a plane and now he's got in touch saying he wants to make my book into a film".

But then, as Tilley says, "that sort of stuff is always happening to me". Every new generation that discovers Leigh Bowery also discovers Sue Tilley. Her newest celebrity friend is "Mark from Westlife - he's obsessed with Leigh and he found me on Facebook and invited me round to dinner". And after I've finished grilling her on her year, I turn my tape recorder off, and she suddenly remembers about the film she was in, Flashbacks of a Fool, starring Daniel Craig. That's her second Daniel Craig film (previously she was 'Woman in the Colony Rooms' in Love is the Devil, about Francis Bacon). And through it all, there's always been the job centre.

"People are so snobby about it and I think, 'You're the fools! Who's got a pension? I'm not the one going to be redundant in this recession.' And, anyway, there's nothing wrong with having a proper job, is there?"