About MF Personal Management

Maggie Ferrari

MF Personal Management is a small exclusive show business agency founded by Maggie Ferrari in 2014, evolving from FM Personal Management with Jo McLaren. It is now run solely by long-time industry professional Maggie Ferrari.

‘Small is Beautiful’ at MF Personal Management.  As a one-woman enterprise I focus on one-to-one representation, where I make a strong effort to get to know my clients personally and their professional strengths and weaknesses, and hope to look upon them thereafter as friends, to whom I am always accessible. I will never represent more than a dozen clients and have no wish to ever become a larger agency or too big to attend to individuals on a personal daily basis. If you are looking for a high-powered, block-busting agency you must seek elsewhere.  

I am the agency’s sole director and have worked in every conceivable aspect of TV, theatre and film (including the back legs of a pantomime horse) since a teenager in 1963. I was a leading member of a flourishing London amateur dramatic company (of which David Jason was also a member; see ‘Saint Bride Players of Fleet Street’ in his autobiography), and started in BBC TV Programme Contracts in Broadcasting House, London, selling such legendary programmes as ‘Hancock’s Half Hour’, ‘Steptoe & Son’,‘Z Cars’ and many others to overseas countries which, in those antique days, were charged in  guineas!   

Diverting briefly into costume design as a buyer, I worked on many Royal Opera House ballet and opera productions, as well as top-class pantomimes before becoming the first Administrator, occasional puppeteer and VO artist of the now-famed Little Angel Marionette Theatre in Islington.

In 1967 I worked alongside Maestro Daniel Barenboim and Michael Flanders (of Flanders & Swann) in a spectacular puppet production of ‘The Soldier’s Tale’ (featuring giant puppets which long preceded ‘War Horse’) to officially open the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the South Bank.

In 1971 I was publicist for the hugely successful first inner London community festival in Islington, working with diverse celebrities of the day, from Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s poet wife Mary to jazz man Humphrey Lyttelton and the legendary Max Adrian. 

Sam Wanamaker with Maggie in 1974

That same year, I met Sam Wanamaker, the famed American actor and director and founder of Shakespeare’s Globe in Southwark.  In 1973, he invited me to take over as Publicity & PR Manager at the temporary Shakespeare Globe for its John Player Summer Theatre season. This comprised Ionesco’s ‘Macbett’, with Harry H Corbett and Terry Scott, and ‘Antony & Cleopatra’ with Vanessa Redgrave, Julian Glover, Dave King & Bob Hoskins, directed by Tony Richardson.  In mid-performance, of the latter, during a huge rainstorm on the August Bank Holiday, the 800-seat tent theatre collapsed, bringing the sold-out season to a soggily premature end. I stayed on as Sam’s Deputy and the project’s Administrator, with a much-depleted staff, to help save and re-establish the project during the next three arduous years, so it’s with some personal pride that I now see the glorious Globe standing by its original site and hailed as “the most perfect theatre in the world.”

In 1976 I joined the publicity office of the new National Theatre.  I promoted a nation-wide tour of ‘Blithe Spirit’, directed by Harold Pinter and featuring Richard Johnson, Maria Aitken, Elizabeth Spriggs and Joan Hickson, who later achieved TV fame as the first Miss Marple.  

However, the open-ended budgets and all-encompassing comfort of the shiny new NT were too much for my egalitarian tastes after the bracing discomfort of the Globe project so, after a chance meeting with Hollywood producer George Folsey Jnr, I became his right-hand woman on ‘An American Werewolf In London’, a low-budget fabulously successful comedy-horror film starring Jenny Agutter, David Naughton and Griffin Dunne, plus a young special efx prosthetics genius called Rick Baker.  

Other feature films I was involved in on the production side included ‘The Return of the Soldier’ (Alan Bates, Julie Christie, Ann-Margret and Glenda Jackson); ‘The Honorary Consul’ (Michael Caine, Richard Gere, Bob Hoskins); ‘Privates on Parade’ (John Cleese, Denis Quilley, Michael Elphick) in-between which I assisted the late casting doyenne Mary Selway on a modest little movie called ‘Star Wars: The Return of the Jedi’.  In 1984, during the post production of ‘Educating Rita’(Michael Caine, Julie Walters) working for American executive producer Herbie Oakes, I visited the Italian shoot of ‘King David’ 

(Richard Gere, Edward Woodward, Niall Buggy, Alice Krige) in Rome where by chance I met up with Romeo Ferrari, a boyfriend I had known in London 23 years earlier.  We married that same year and I moved to Florence where our daughter was born in 1987. Romeo died in 1998 and my daughter and I returned to live in the UK. 

I became a tutor at a local children’s theatre school in West Sussex. Later this evolved into my running a successful children & young people’s agency, Stage A Management.  Jo McLaren was an associate of SAM and we set up our own adult agency in December 2013.  I am also a playwright and have won prizes for two plays in the Arundel Summer Theatre Festival in 2004 and 2008.

Jo McLaren

JO McLAREN is one of the top Stunt Co-ordinators in Europe.  She has worked on most major feature and TV films, doubling for such A-List stars as Angelina Jolie, Rachel Weisz, Cate Blanchett, Gemma Arterton, and various ‘Bond girls.’  Jo has given up active agency involvement in order to concentrate on stunt co-ordination and produce feature films. 

‘NUTS & BOLTS’

Following a personal meeting or ‘phone conversation with me, artists may be invited for representation by MF Personal Management.  If they accept they will be asked to confirm their current Spotlight membership, number and page and also if they have a Show-reel or anything similar to help promote them.  They will also be asked to sign an Agency Contractual Agreement (which includes a list of our Agency rates) and fill in an extensive Personal Record Form, enabling me to give swift and accurate answers to enquiries from casting people.

I do like to meet clients early on in our association so that we can get to know one another on a personal basis.

During this process, clients will talk with me when I will sound out their professional preferences.  For instance, some clients dislike working in commercials, or theatre, or panto, or pop videos. Once I have this information, I start searching for suitable castings. 

I need to know when clients are unavailable for work and trust they will 

always communicate with me in good time regarding other engagements they may commit to, independent of this agency, as well as holidays and periods of unavailability so that no pointless submissions are made.

There’s a saying in Italy that, ideally, you should choose a young doctor and an old lawyer.  In loose terms I hope I may claim to be similar, being wise in the diverse ways of show business and youthful enough in outlook, attitude and ability to ‘think outside the box’ and successfully obtain good work for my clients.  

Maggie Ferrari
mfpersonalmanagement@gmail.com
ferrarimclarenmanagement14@gmail.com
Landline: 01798 344356
Mobile: 07758 052325