John Mollo
Oscar-winning costume designer whose interest in military dress inspired his work on Star Wars
JOHN MOLLO, who has died aged 86, was a British costume designer who won Oscars for his work on Star Wars (1977) and Gandhi (1982). The author of numerous illustrated books on military dress, Mollo was the perfect man to bring authenticity to the costumes for George Lucas’s imaginary space wars. Having advised on Nicholas and Alexander (1971) and Barry Lyndon (1975), Star Wars was Mollo’s first credited costume design job. The outfits would inspire an army of obsessives, but as Mollo recalled the design process was rather a matter of “cobbling together” bits and pieces from stock clothing.
When Mollo first met Lucas in 1975 at Elstree Studios, the director seemed somewhat vague about the brief. He wanted costumes that would be unobtrusive and that would appear familiar and strange at the same time. The bad guys he explained, should have a “fascist” look, while the hero should have the “aura” of the American Wild West.
Lucas then decamped to Hollywood, and with just three months to go before shooting began, Mollo went to the London film costumier’s Berman’s to get some ideas: “For Darth Vader I had to go to three departments: the ecclesiastical department for a robe, the modern department for a motorcycle suit and the military department for a [Second World War] German helmet and gas mask. We cobbled it all together and there was Darth Vader.”
The storm trooper costumes, too, had a jury-rigged quality: “We had a black all-in-one leotard … the arms were slid on – the top arm and the bottom arm were attached with black elastic – a belt around the waist had suspender things that the legs were attached to. They wore ordinary domestic rubber gloves with a bit of latex shoved on the front. The boots were ordinary spring-sided black boots painted white with shoe dye. Strange to say it all worked.”
Mollo was also commissioned by Lucas to help to convince an initially reluctant Sir Alec Guinness to play the part of the Jedi master Obi-wan Kenobi, after creating a series of sketches. “George wanted us to go and see Sir Alec with the drawings, which Guinness liked very much,” he recalled. Mollo had finally settled on a monastic brown cloak and cowl design. “I got the feeling that it was the costume that really sold him,” he recalled.
Yet Mollo doubted whether the film would ever be shown: “I remember someone asking me what I was doing and I said: ‘It’s sort of a space western and one of the heroes is a dustbin’. We really didn’t know what we were doing … When we heard they were queuing all around the block to see the film, we couldn’t believe it.”
When Mollo went on stage to receive his Oscar, he did so flanked by actors wearing his creations. “As you see, the costumes from Star Wars are really not so much costumes as a bit of plumbing and general automobile engineering,” he told the audience with typical modesty.
John Mollo was born in London on March 18 1931, the eldest of three sons of a Russian émigré father who ran a company developing uses for sprayed concrete, and an English mother.
During the 1930s his father bought his sons model soldiers in Germany which John and his brothers would paint to stage mock battles. John’s interest in toy soldiers continued into later life and he would donate a detailed diorama of the Battle of Waterloo, featuring thousands of inch-high beautifully painted lead figures set in hand-painted scenery, to the Iceni Village museum at Cockley Cley, Norfolk.
After education at Charterhouse and the Farnham School of Art in Surrey, followed by National Service with the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry, John Mollo joined his father’s company. He continued to develop an interest in military uniforms that would result in the publication of several books, beginning in 1973 with a study of cavalry uniforms of Waterloo.
It was this expertise that led to his becoming involved in the film world as a historical adviser on The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968) followed by Nicholas and Alexandra (1971).
As well as Star Wars and its sequel, The Empire Strikes Back (1980), he created the casual Hawaiian-shirt ambience of the doomed spaceship in Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), and in 1982 he shared a second Oscar with Bhanu Athaiya for their costume designs on Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi.
His other credits included Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984) Revolution (1985) Cry Freedom (1987), Chaplin (1992), The Three Musketeers (1993), The Jungle Book (1994) and Event Horizon (1997).
In 1956 he married Ann Farquharson. The marriage was dissolved and in 1968 he married Louise Pongracz, who survives him with their son.
John Mollo, born March 18 1931, died October 25 2017