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,…