Judy Welch

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Judy Welch was born Judith Eleanor Welch on June 19th 1936 in Peterborough, Ontario. Before turning to modeling, Judy trained as a dancer in Toronto. Upon winning beauty pageants, namely the titles of Miss Toronto and Miss Maple Leaf-Canada, and becoming Canada's first finalist in the Miss World pageant in 1957, her fame rose and this petite blonde all-Canadian bombshell was soon attracting the attention of the likes of Elvis Presley.

Judy's print-modeling and spokesperson career turned to agent and modeling school operator. Her namesake agency was the first to put Canadian models on the map internationally. She scouted most famously Monika Schnarre, Linda Evangelista et al., and her household has boasted the presence of up and comer Naomi Campbell at one time. Judy worked closely with fellow agents in New York, Milan, Paris, London and Tokyo. Probably the hardest working woman in the world of fashion, she could be found on the phone around the clock, in step with the time zones where her "brood" of models were assigned. Working hard went hand in hand with an intense social life. The Rolling Stones most notably attended her parties, as did a young Lee Majors, friend Burt Reynolds and often Bill Cosby could be overheard in the booking room entertaining the bookers over the speaker phones. Today, after being rewarded with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the world of Canadian Fashion, she has also belatedly become an unlikely model of early feminism for her evolution away from the pin-up to most powerful woman in fashion. She is credited today with empowering many women through access to a lucrative modelling career and expanding many a woman's horizons with travel to exotic locales for many of the small-town, wholesome looking young women she scouted. Retired today, Judy has returned to her love of crafts and is designing hand beaded jewelry which has been featured at Fashion Week and in magazines by stylists. A little known fact about Judy Welch was her ritual of making preserves and decorating wreaths that used to be shipped across the world at Christmastime to her many associates. She has left the Rosedale home she had for many years and which served as headquarters, and has long been documented as "haunted" adding to the convergence of energies of the busy household. Media:http://www.torontoghosts.org/roxborough1.htm A frenetic lifestyle combined with personal losses have never deterred this combative and upbeat Canadian. Judy survived the loss of her mother at an early age, in an airplane crash over BC. Married once, she was also soonafter widowed. Both her father and brother passed away in her years as a top agent, who she nursed in their last years. A sister, Rachel, lives happily in Florida. A longtime European companion of Judy's, Gunther Oldenburg succumbed to illness in more recent years. Dear friend and impersonator Craig Russell also passed on in 1990. Today, Judy Welch lives happily with actor Ian McPhail. Judy is childless, though her extended family counts many of her former models who gravitate back to this magnetic and candid woman. Closest were the late Sam Turkis, founder of the forerunner to Toronto's Fashion Week, the Toronto Festival of Canadian Fashion and today's modeling agent and protégée, Sondra Napier. Judy can often be found in her beloved garden, a staple of any house she's owned, growing lush flowers and herbs for cooking.

Judy has successfully recovered from hip replacement surgery in 2007 and is in better health after having long been misdiagnosed for what turns out to be a rare strain of a hereditary form of arthritis. She still advises many of Toronto's modeling agents to this day, whom she's helped at crucial times along the way, as in the case of onetime fledgeling Elmer Olsen. She occasionally still gets behind young people of talent and promise, not having lost her eye. Her long-term project of writing her memoirs denoting her life and times still remains a draft.