Ronald Searle
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Ronald William Fordham Searle C.B.E.(born March 3, 1920) is an English artist and cartoonist. Searle trained at Cambridge College of Arts and Technology, currently known as Anglia Ruskin University. He is the creator of, among other things, St Trinian's School- subject of several books and five full-length films - and co-author (with Geoffrey Willans) of the Molesworth tetralogy.
Searle was born in Cambridge, to parents Willie and Nellie (his father was a porter at Cambridge Railway Station), and he started drawing at the age of five and left school at the age of fifteen. In April 1939, realising that war was inevitable, he abandoned his art studies to enlist in the Royal Engineers. He trained for two years in the United Kingdom and, in 1941, published the first St Trinian's cartoon in the magazine Lilliput. In January 1942 he was stationed in Singapore. After a month of fighting in Malaya, Singapore fell to the Japanese and he was taken prisoner along with his cousin Tom Fordham Searle. He spent the rest of the war a prisoner, first in Changi Prison and then in the Kwai jungle, working on the Siam-Burma Death Railway. Whilst a prisoner he made a record of the brutal camp conditions that he and his fellow prisoners were suffering, which he managed to hide under the mattresses of prisoners dying of cholera. He was liberated late in 1945, returned to England and published several of the surviving drawings in fellow prisoner Russell Braddon's The Naked Island. Many more of the soul-wrenching drawings appear in his 1986 book "Ronald Searle, To the Kwai and Back, War Drawings 1939-1945." All these original drawings - some 300 of them - are now in the permanent collection of the Imperial War Museum, London.
He married Kaye Webb in 1947; they had twins, Kate and Johnny. Searle produced an extraordinary volume of work during the 1950s: drawings for Life magazine, Holiday, Punch, cartoons for the New Yorker, the Sunday Express and the News Chronicle, along with more St Trinian's books, Molesworth, as well as travel books in collaboration with the humorist Alex Atkinson, animation in Hollywood , and advertisements, posters etc. He received much recognition for his work, especially in America, including the National Cartoonist Society Advertising and Illustration Award in 1959 and 1965, the Reuben Award in 1960, their Illustration Award in 1980 and their Advertising Award in 1986 and 1987.
In 1961 he moved to Paris, leaving his family, and later marrying Monica Koenig. In France he worked more on reportage for Life Magazine and Holiday and less on cartoons. He also continued to work in a broad range of media, and produced books (including his well-known cat books), animations for films, and sculpture for commemorative medals both for the French Mint and the British Art Medal Society. In 1965, Searle completed the opening, intermission and ending credits for the popular comedy Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines. Since 1975 he and Monica live and work in the mountains of Haute Provence.
His work has had considerable influence on later cartoonists, including Oliphant, Matt Groening and Hilary Knight and the animators of the Disney film: 101 Dalmations. In 2005 he was the subject of a long BBC documentary on his life and work by Russell Davies. In 2007 he was decorated by France with their highest award: the Légion d'honneur.
[edit] External links
- biography and samples
- Ronald Searle & the St Trinian's Cartoons
- prints and original work for sale, and full bibliography
- biography and selected bibliography
- Ronald Searle in Le Monde
- The Great Fur Opera illustrated for the Hudson's Bay Company
- Medals created for the British Art Medal Society
- Comiclopedia: Ronald Searle
- Scion of a Noble Line - Interview with Ronald Searle
- Interview on BBC Radio 4, Desert Island Discs
- NCS Awards
- IMDB entry
- Antonio Pisanello - 23rd FIDEM Congress Medal. Sculpture. Victoria and Albert Museum. Retrieved on 2007-09-01.
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