My birth mother, Doris Rau, known as Pip, who has died aged 86, was a dealer in central Asian antique textiles and costumes.
For 40 years she ran a shop called Rau in Islington, north London, featuring stock that came from Uzbekistan, northern Pakistan and above all Afghanistan, a country she adored and which for many years she visited annually.
Film designers often came calling to use what she had to offer, and The Shining (1980) and Gladiator (2000) were among many movies to feature items borrowed from her collection.
Her fabulous assemblage of ikat textiles, made with a complex resist-dying and weaving technique, was so good that that it was exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2007.
Pip was born in London to Jewish parents, Fred Rau, a commodities trader, and his wife, Hanna (nee Felsenstein). Rebellious by nature, she never settled in any school for long and was repeatedly expelled.
In 1954, aged 16, she enrolled at St Martin’s School of Art in London, but her father soon packed her off to Israel, believing she needed the discipline of kibbutz life. By the time she was 19, however, both her parents had died. She studied for two years at London’s Central School of Arts and Crafts, as well as at art schools in Jerusalem, San Francisco and Paris, later boasting that she failed to complete any of the courses. In Paris she lived at the celebrated Beat hotel, and was given her first joint by the beat poet Gregory Corso.
In 1960 Pip travelled across the US, and in New York she was imprisoned for five days for her part in a nuclear disarmament rally. Later that year, driving from London to Russia, she was almost killed in a car crash. While she was in hospital, a Russian army colonel fell in love with her and proposed marriage. She declined. The following year she became pregnant with me and had me adopted. My birth father was the potter Robin Welch.
In 1963 Pip married the Israeli actor Ili Gorlizki and had two more sons, Yoram and Alexander. She and Ili were divorced in 1975 after a long separation.
By then Pip had bought her shop in Islington, stocking and re-stocking it with material she gathered on frequent trips to central Asia. She had first visited Afghanistan in 1973, driving with a friend from London to Herat, on the Iranian border. In Kabul she became well known among the dealers there for her adventurous spirit as well as her keen eye and fierce negotiating skills. She decided to close Rau in 2014, feeling that it had run its natural course.
After looking for me for about 10 years, Pip finally contacted me in 1997 and we subsequently established a lovely relationship. In retirement she devoted more attention to her own collections of Uzbek embroideries, ikats and early 20th-century central Asian photographs, and she continued to travel widely. She had maintained her regular visits to Afghanistan well into the 1990s, even after the rise of the Taliban, but went there very little after 9/11, much to her disappointment.
She is survived by me, Yoram and Alexander, and by her two older brothers, John and Stephen.
