FREDERICTON – With her stock model glory all but forgotten, Mary Ellesmere reflected on the height of her career when she was featured on a local bus advertisement. From humble beginnings, this young hopeful had so much promise before the glamour of small-scale advertising got the best of her.
“I started off with my brother’s friend who rented a small photography studio,” explained the model known as the ‘Starlet of the Stocks’. “Immediately after my shoot, my photographer told me that I have something really special that he’s never seen before; a natural talent for putting my hands on my hips to make me appear more serious.”
Many small businesses, local governments, and not-for-profits skimming the istockimages.com website took notice of the 28-year-old administrative assistant. Purchases for her photos began to add up from a community college first year promotion pamphlet to a pharmaceutical website asking for human subjects in their studies.
Then came the big break her career was waiting for. A Fredericton-based property developer Harold Quinn was looking for a model to promote the sale of new cottages in the area. He needed the perfect face of excited-thinking look. Ellesmere was selected among the dozens of other faces Quinn found on the internet.
“I just couldn’t keep my eyes off of that face,” said Quinn. “That face was going to sell cottages and I was going to make her into a star with a $5,000 bus ad run.”
And sell it did.
“Complete strangers were stopping me in the street asking me to do my excited-thinking look over and over,” said Ellesmere with a twinkle in her eye reflecting on the sweet memories of being public transit’s number one advertisement for two months.
Her fame from the bus ad took her to new heights in the industry. She swept the East Coast Stockies with wins in best new female model, best teeth, best shocked-look, and nine other categories. Not long after, internationally renowned stock image magazine Foto-genius rated Ellesmere as number four in the Top 10 models for supply photos in Eastern Canada.
However, fame and a whopping $22,000 a year income came at an expensive personal price. She developed an addiction problem to solid colour sweaters and whitening strips. By the end of her year long escapade, friends couldn’t recognize her unless she posed with her arms crossed or made a questioning face with her index finger pressed on the center of her chin.
“‘I need whitening! I need whitening! My teeth aren’t white enough!’ she would cry,” explained close friend to Ellesmere. “She wasn’t among good company either; she kept hanging around with those stock models from the telemarketing company.”
After an intervention, her friends and family committed her to the Shutterstock Clinic for Whitening Dependency. Rehab was hard, but after three months, Ellesmere successfully completed the program and thought she was ready to restart her career.
But her efforts at several new poses wasn’t convincing anyone. Advertisers and photographers had already found a new model, Nancy Drummond, who could play any white female model between the ages of 20-35.
