SNAP; She was queen of the catwalks ... now supermodel Helena tells how she found new focus in life.

SHE'S hung up her ihigh heels and iwaved goodbye to the catwalk ... now sexy Helena Christensen has stepped into a new role BEHIND the camera.

But although she has swapped lipstick for a flash-gun, she will still enjoy life in the fast lane...

Jetting around the globe as a photo-journalist for America's latest fashion magazine Nylon.

The sizzling Scandinavian sex kitten dated INXS frontman Michael Hutchence, until he dumped her for TV's Paula Yates.

While he went on a downward spiral of drink and drugs, leading to his death in a Sydney hotel room, Helena ignored the headlines and held her elegant head high.

Now she's happy again, away from the frontline of the fashion pack and settling down with American boyfriend Norman Reedus - the man Helena met the night she returned to Los Angeles from Hutchence's funeral.

"I've thought about marriage and babies with other boyfriends, but it was never quite right," she says. "I'm ready for that now."

A cosy life, with a steady career, couldn't have been further from Helena's mind during her four- year love affair with Hutchence, when the jet-setting pair were regulars at celebrity bashes on both sides of the Atlantic.

At its height, the couple, who were at one point engaged, spent thousands to enjoy one night together in London when their career was pulling them in different directions around the globe.

Even four years after their split, Helena is still guarded about him.

"I want to start over," she says. "His death has been written about so much that it becomes impersonal. And that's terrible, because for me it's something that's so personal."

With homes in Monte Carlo, New York and Los Angeles, the girl who admitted that "it's very embarrassing" to be a supermodel, has quit while she's well and truly ahead. "I knew that no matter what I did next, I couldn't win," she adds.

"But I like what I do and I feel good about it."

Her decision to earn a living as a photographer is no flash in the pan. She's carried a camera since she was 18 and spent six months backpacking around the world with a lensman boyfriend.

When she was a child, rock music fanatic Helena dreamed of becoming a music journalist.

The daughter of a Peruvian mother and Danish father, it all changed for Helena - who had her first modelling assignment at nine months - when she was crowned Miss Denmark.

AN invitation came to spend the weekend in Paris with a small model agency, she was snapped by photographer Peter Lindbergh and the rest is history.

"The talent of the supermodels was to keep people captivated for years in a business where nobody lasts long," she says. "I'm proud to have been part of that elite group."

She was paid pounds 2 million to be the face and figure behind a Playtex bra ad campaign, and pounds 500,000 to add new life to the fashion chain Dorothy Perkins.

And in another megabucks deal, Helena was the face of cosmetics giant Cover Girl and posed nude as a Pirelli calendar girl before peeling off again for the movie Pret-a-Porter.

But the glitzy life had its downsides. "I went to bed crying so many times because of what the Press said," she says."You're young and your body is changing. If you're big, you're mocked. If you're skinny, you're blamed for anorexia. The whole supermodel thing created goddesses out of us. Goddesses with no credibility.

"You're patronised by the Press, regarded as stereotypical - as though you spend all the time partying with rock stars."

Helena isn't the first model to leave the catwalk for a new career.

Three years ago, Tereza Maxova ditched the luxury life to help aban-doned kids in her native Czech Republic.

Instead of looking lovely at fashion shows, the magazine cover girl befriended drug addicts' babies, disabled kids and gypsy children.

She set up a fund-raising foundation in Prague to force through changes in an adoption law that allowed absent parents to block their children's adoptions.

WHEN Italian model iAntonella Moccia iquit, there was no going back. After working in the fashion capital, Milan, for 14 years, she became a NUN.

Taking vows of chastity, poverty and obedience, she's now Sister Elisabetta in the Order of the Sisters of the Holy Spirit in Rome.

She began working with the poor in the city's slums after her father died of cancer.

Cameron Diaz, one of the hottest babes in Hollywood, who made her name as a cover girl in the US when she was sweet sixteen, also took the exit door.

She cut her teeth on low-budgetmovies while she was polishing up her showbiz act, and hit the big time as a terrible karaoke singer in My Best Friend's Wedding.

She was the long-term partner of Matt Dillon, but now the golden girl, who commands pounds 10 million a movie, has been spotted on the arm of tough-guy director Oliver Stone.

Koo Stark was a model and actress when she dated Prince Andrew in 1982. Then she became a photo- grapher.

More recently, she's teamed up with model Saffron Aldridge to write a book on child abuse.

For Koo and the other girls, life has entered a whole new chapter.