British cartoonist Ronald Searle, 91, creator of the willfully wicked schoolgirls of St. Trinian's who amused generations of Britons, died "peacefully in his sleep" Friday in Draguignan in southern France after a short illness.
Mr. Searle was a prolific illustrator who drew for the New Yorker, Punch, and Walt Disney, but it was the fictional girls' boarding school where the students ran riot that most captured the public imagination.
The long-legged, leering schoolgirls drank, smoked, and generally cut a swath of destruction; their weapon-wielding antics were colored by Mr. Searle's morbid sense of humor. His satire of the venerable English school system struck a chord, launching a series of hit films, including one recent incarnation, St. Trinian's, starring Colin Firth and Russell Brand.
Mr. Searle's dark streak may well have been informed by his experiences as a soldier during World War II. Captured by the Japanese at Singapore, he spent time under atrocious conditions as a prisoner of war. His drawings of camp life were published after his liberation in 1945 in fellow prisoner Russell Braddon's account of his own captivity, The Naked Island.
St. Trinian's sly schoolgirls made him famous, but he insisted that the students were just "a small part of my work."
But St. Trinian's refused to die, despite his attempt to end the series by having the girls blow up their school.
- AP
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