My mother, Jill Searle, who has died aged 84, worked at the unconventional end of the modelling industry, providing film-makers, advertisers and other creatives with “characterful” models of all shapes, looks and sizes.
Jill started at the Ugly Models agency when it was launched in 1969, and as the person-in-charge was largely responsible for its success over the next 20 years until she left to set up her own agency, The Casting Department, in the mid-1990s.
Ugly was a pioneering idea at the time. Prior to its launch, model agencies generally concentrated only on the young and beautiful, but a new wave of British photographers such as David Bailey and Terence Donovan wanted to use “real” people in their work, and Ugly filled the gap.
Jill was born in Tooting, south-west London, to Doris (nee Farrow), a housewife, and Christopher Frost, a panel beater. At the first opportunity she left Mitcham County grammar school and headed to live in the centre of London, where she took on various administrative jobs and met the artist Terry Searle in a coffee shop. They married in 1959 and embarked on a semi-bohemian lifestyle in a set of rooms in Soho.
For a time in the early 60s Jill worked at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club, doing a bit of everything, from admin work to cleaning to making fry-up breakfasts for the musicians. Among the musical icons she met was Ella Fitzgerald, who took a shine to her first child, Timothy, and bounced him on her knee.
In 1969 Jill saw a mysterious advert looking for someone to take on the running of a new company. It turned out to be Ugly, which was being established in Fitzrovia by three creative industry entrepreneurs; they liked Jill and gave her the job of running it from scratch, advertising for people to sign up as models and creating a catalogue for ad agencies.
It was a one-woman band in the early days and Jill answered the phone, took bookings, interviewed models and became known as the person to go to for unusual people. The job helped her to meet and make friends with people from various walks of life, including celebrities. But she was always unfazed by it all. On one occasion, helping out with the casting for the film The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle (1980), she ended up playing the role of Sid Vicious’s mum when Marianne Faithfull failed to show up.
However, she remained a Mitcham girl at heart. Never one for glitzy parties, she preferred to spend weekends with her sister, Bonnie, playing cards and going to the bingo. As a dressmaker, knitter and embroiderer nothing was beyond her capabilities, and she was also an avid reader and painter.
Jill worked for her own agency into her 70s, and stopped only when she suffered a brain aneurysm in 2015.
Her marriage to Terry ended in divorce in the late 70s. She is survived by their three children, Timothy, Matthew, and me; a son, Thomas, from a later relationship with Dessie Murphy; and five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
