Cindy Crawford ''learned about how to be famous'' from Richard Gere.

The supermodel, who divorced the 66-year-old actor in 1995 after four years of marriage, admits he had a big impact on her life even though she decided not to write about their relationship in her new book 'Becoming'.

The 49-year-old beauty said: ''I didn't want [the book] to be a tell-all or an autobiography. It was important to me to share only stories that had a message or a lesson that had a universal appeal...

''Look, I learned a lot from Richard. I learned about how to be famous. Again, that's not a universal lesson. And a lot of the personal things, everything else I learned from that, were for me. It's not something I want to share. If I felt that there was a great good that could come of it, I might have shared more, but I didn't think that there was anything for other people to learn or benefit from. And I wanted to be respectful.''

Cindy - who has son Presley, 16, and daughter Kaia, 14, with husband Rande Gerber - is gearing up to celebrate her 50th birthday next February and feels ''at peace'' with getting older.

She told Porter magazine: ''In my thirties and even early forties, I could kind of still fake it. But then I started to worry that I was disappointing people, that I wasn't delivering the 'Cindy Crawford' that they expected. But I'm past that now. I can't even smoke-and-mirrors the Cindy from my twenties anymore. And that's okay.

''What I have to offer now is different, that's all. It's not worse, even though the world may not always agree with you about that. And I'm pretty at peace with it.''