Frances Grill, Founder of an Inclusive Modeling Agency, Dies at 90

Her death was confirmed by her son, Joey Grill.

From its inception, Click refused to be limited by any conventional standards of what a model should look like. Over the years it has represented white models (Elle Macpherson, model-actresses Isabella Rossellini and Uma Thurman), black models (Gail O’Neill and singer-actress Whitney Houston),transgender model Teri Toye and male model Attila Von Somogyi.

Macpherson, who began working with Grill as a teenager in the early 1980s, said in a phone interview Monday that Grill “wasn’t interested in cookie-cutter talent.”

“It wasn’t really about how people looked — she was interested in who they were and what they stood for,” she said. “In a world where being homogeneous was where — especially as a teenager — you wanted to be, she celebrated differences.”

Talisa Soto Bratt, who is of Puerto Rican heritage, became a Click model around the same time as Macpherson, after other agencies had turned her down.

“In 1982, diversity did not exist in magazines or the fashion industry,” she said Monday. “It was completely driven by ‘blonde and blue eyes.’ Of course, Frances — her whole vision was: ‘Look at the world, look how diverse it is. We need to represent that.'”

Grill was born Frances Gecker on Aug. 10, 1928, in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn to Fred and Beckie (Goldstein) Gecker. Her father was a longshoreman and union activist, her mother a seamstress.

Grill studied stenography in high school and, on graduating, took a job as a secretary. She left the position in the early 1950s to check hats at the Village Gate nightclub in Greenwich Village. There she found herself at ease among the club’s bohemian clientele, Joey Grill said in an interview.

“It was a melting pot for poets and artists and musicians and photographers,” he said, “people who were what she always called freethinkers.”

Grill became a photographer’s agent thanks to a chance meeting and her own audacity. On an especially stormy night in 1962, while standing under an awning to shelter herself from the rain, she got chatting with a man, Alberto Rizzo, who was also waiting out the storm. He told her that he was a fashion photographer. She quickly volunteered that — what a coincidence! — she was a photographers’ agent, although she had never done that type of work before. He became her first client.

Her roster grew to include leading photographers, among them Frank Horvat, Oliviero Toscani and Steven Meisel.

Grill’s move into managing models was also spontaneous. A couple of decades after she had begun representing photographers, one of her clients, Fabrizio Ferri, came to her office accompanied by Rossellini, his girlfriend at the time. She hadn’t posed for any professional photographers other than Ferri.

“She looked at her, and put her finger to her mouth, like she did when was thinking,” Ferri said of Grill in a phone interview. “She started looking Isabella up and down, and then she said, ‘Hmm, I think I’m going to open a model agency.'”

Grill immediately got to work on behalf of Rossellini, her first client.

“She took Isabella straight to Avedon, and the next day Richard Avedon shot Isabella for the cover of American Vogue,” Ferri said. “That’s how Frances was — she was pure instinct.”

The two women’s relationship lasted nearly two decades, and it produced Rossellini’s long-term, multimillion-dollar contract with the cosmetics company Lancôme.

“Frances and her Click was more than an agency to me,” Rossellini wrote in an email Monday. “She was my mentor who taught me about work ethics” as well as how to “manage a career and enjoy every second of it.”

As some of her clients began to draw interest in Hollywood, Grill helped found Flick East-West Talents, to represent actors. She was also a co-founder of a bicoastal theatrical management agency, Framework Entertainment.

She married Irwin Grill, an assistant high school principal, in 1954. The marriage ended in divorce in the late 1960s, but they remained friends; Irwin Grill now works in Click’s accounting department.

In the early 1970s, Grill married Ulf Lundqvist, a designer; that marriage, too, ended in divorce.

In addition to her son, Grill is survived by a daughter, Stephanie Grill — both children work for Click — and by four grandchildren.

Grill had continued to work at the agency, on West 27th Street in the Chelsea section, until about six months ago.

Although Grill was immersed in the fashion industry, she shopped mostly at thrift shops. Anthony Baratta, an interior designer who was a friend and neighbor of Grill’s for many years, would frequently tag along on shopping trips near their weekend homes in Flanders, New York, on the East End of Long Island.

“One night I was watching the Academy Awards, and down the red carpet, there walks Frances with Isabella Rossellini,” he said by phone. “She is in this black ensemble. I know it came from the Riverhead Salvation Army the weekend before, but the way that she carried things off was very Fran.”

Her impetus wasn’t frugality but a desire to find quirky items that suited her, Joey Grill said. Her trademark accessory was a pair of large eyeglasses, which she began wearing in the early 1980s, he said, to keep cigarette smoke out of her eyes.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.