Monique Luiz

Monique Luiz (née Corzilius; born May 3, 1961) is an American former child model best known for starring in a famous^{[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]} television advertisement for Lyndon Johnson's 1964 presidential campaign known as "Daisy".

Monique Corzilius was born and raised in Pine Beach, New Jersey, the youngest of the three children of Fred and Colette Corzilius. While she was a child, her mother began taking her to New York City on child acting auditions. Working under the stage name Monique Cozy, her first job came at age two, modeling in a print advertisement for Lipton soup. A successful audition at the offices of the advertising office of Doyle Dane Bernbach earned her the starring role in "Daisy", for which her parents were paid $105 ($800 today). According to her, her parents were unaware of what the ad was for until they saw it air. She, herself, did not see the spot until 36 years later, in 2000.^{[9][10][11][12]}

Corzilius continued to appear in television and print advertisements for several years following "Daisy". In 1975 she moved, with her parents, to France, where she remained until adulthood, eventually marrying and finally returning to the U.S. in 1983 and settling in Arizona. Her Portuguese husband Manuel Luiz was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in about 2011.^[9][12]

As an adult, Luiz appeared in the 2014 documentary Bombs Away about the 1964 election and its role in ushering "in a new age of highly negative television advertising".^[13][14]

In 2016 she was enlisted to appear in a television campaign advertisement for the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. The ad featured Luiz introducing herself, in voice-over, with footage from the "Daisy" ad, after which she appears on-screen and announces, "The fear of nuclear war that we had as children, I never thought that our children would have to deal with that again." The spot was aired during the commercial breaks of evening newscasts in Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.^[15]

References