It was 40 years ago today ...

"She's not a girl who misses much. Do do do do do do — oh yeah!" — John Lennon, "Happiness is a Warm Gun" (from "The White Album")

In machine gun-like fashion, artist Jann Haworth delivers a volley of support, dissension, enthusiasm, disdain, endorsement and opposition ... depending on the subject you raise.

She is quick-witted, opinionated and disarmingly polite — a true feminist who calls and visits her children with strict regularity.

Now in her 60s, her face retains the adolescent comeliness that once captivated young British artists in the 1960s.

From the early "Pop" days of her visual-art career, where she helped then-husband Peter Blake design and construct the set for the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album cover, to this year's exhibit of Pop abstract assemblages in the Salt Lake Art Center, Haworth has been a major voice for the democratization of art.

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Born in 1942 in Hollywood, Calif., Haworth spent much of her childhood running around movie-studio backlots, where her father, Academy Award-winner Teddy Haworth, designed sets.

At age 8, her artist-mother taught Haworth to sew. "It's really no exaggeration to say that I really began making my own clothes from that time," she said.

Later, her ability to sew and interpret dress patterns, combined with her experiences on Hollywood backlots, became the catalyst for her cloth "celebrity dolls," such as "Lindner Doll" (1965), "Cowboy" (1966) and "The Maid and BB" (1969).

While studying art at the University of California Los Angeles, Haworth took a summer vacation to visit her father on the set of "The Longest Day," which was being filmed in France. On her way home, she stopped in England.

"As soon as I got off the train," Haworth said, "and my foot touched English soil, I knew I wanted to stay."

And stay she did — from 1959-97.

Her return to America found her high in the mountains of Provo in a cabin at the Sundance resort. She's lived there ever since.

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In 1961, Haworth enrolled at the Courtauld Institute in London; a year later she entered London's Slade School of Fine Art.