Stunning model Laura Bailey is recovering from the shock of being axed from a much-touted British movie.

The former Wheatley schoolgirl and ex-girlfriend of Richard Gere was devastated on hearing her scenes from Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels were being left on the cutting room floor.

A spokesman for the model said: "She's disappointed. It's hard to work all that time and then not to see yourself in the film."

Laura, aged 26, was due to play the part of Sloane Daisy in the gangster movie based in London's East End alongside football hard man Vinnie Jones.

The Pretty Polly model spent ten months filming for the movie and has now taken a holiday in Bali to recover from the disappointment.

A spokesman for film-makers Polygram said: "It was decided to cut out some characters. It was all done very amicably."

Laura, formerly Laura Birks, moved to Wheatley with her parents in the mid-1970s, but they split up when she was just five, leaving her with huge emotional scars.

She sailed through Wheatley Park school with straight As and gained a first in English from Southampton University.

She was captain of the Wheatley school netball, hockey and rounders teams but rarely dated boys, preferring to concentrate on her studies. Former friends and neighbours were shocked that she made her name as a model and not in an academic field.

In 1994, the model was snapped by the paparazzi climbing over a wall belonging to Hollywood heart-throb Gere and rumours of a romance were fast to circulate.

Over the next two years, she was rarely spotted in Wheatley and divided her time between seeing Gere and modelling, charging up to £3,000 a day for photo shoots.

The romance was later dismissed as a passing affair but it was the final nail in the coffin for Gere's marriage to Cindy Crawford, which ended in divorce.

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