John Mollo
Costume designer BORN MARCH 18, 1931 DIED OCTOBER 25, 2017, AGED 86
BEFORE working on Star Wars and creating the iconic Darth Vader and Stormtrooper costumes, John Mollo was a military history expert who had never seen a sci-fi movie.
He had written several books on military uniforms, and found consultant work on films including The Charge Of The Light Brigade and Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon.
Then his name got mentioned to George Lucas and Mollo never looked back. “I met with him and he seemed very good,” Lucas recalled in The Making Of Star Wars: The Definitive Story Behind The Original Film.
“I wanted somebody that really knew armour, who was more into military hardware rather than somebody who knew how to design for the stage.
“I wanted designs which would blend in and look like they belonged.”
Mollo joined the project as the film’s costume designer in 1976, with a meagre budget of $90,000 – less than the cost of any of the individual sets – and began turning Ralph McQuarrie’s iconic concept images into wearable costumes for the film’s lead characters, Stormtroopers and aliens. “For Darth Vader, we put on a black motorcycle suit, a Nazi helmet, a gas mask and a monk’s cloak we found in the Middle Ages department,” he recalled.
When he won the Oscar for best costume design after Star Wars became the highest-grossing film of 1977, London-born Mollo said in his speech: “The costumes of Star Wars are not so much costumes, as bits of plumbing and automobile engineering.”
He returned to the Star Wars franchise in 1980 for The Empire Strikes Back, directed by Irvin Kershner.
In 1983 he shared a second Academy Award with Bhanu Athaiya for their costume design on Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi. Other films he worked on included Alien, Greystoke: The Legend Of Tarzan, Cry Freedom, Air America and Chaplin.
His second wife, Louise and their son Tom survive him.