Yvonne Blake
Oscar-winning British costumier who solved the problem of ‘lumps and bumps’ in Superman’s outfit
YVONNE BLAKE, who has died aged 78, was a costume designer who won an Oscar for her work on Franklin Schaffner’s 1971 period drama Nicholas and Alexandra.
She won the Oscar jointly with Antonio Castillo, but the experience was not a happy one. “It was agony,” she recalled. “The production was oversize. I was a young 29-year-old, I was disorganised, and I was in charge of several departments with a lot of people in them. But there were two tailors there who hated one another, and I was caught in the middle of that. It was a year of preparation and another year of filming, and by the end of it I was very angry and depressed.”
Yvonne Blake was on the point of quitting the profession until she learned that she had been nominated for an Oscar. She was convinced she had no chance of winning, but her father persuaded her to attend the ceremony. “If it hadn’t been for the Russian Revolution, I wouldn’t be here today,” she declared after taking the statuette.
Seven years later she designed the costumes for the first film in the Superman series. “It was a question of reproducing what looked like a pretty silly costume into one that could be worn by an actor that would look attractive and believable,” she recalled. “It was important that the tight and shorts did not look like ballet dancers, so the problem of lumps and bumps was solved by wearing a plastic protection shield normally used by boxers.”
Yvonne Blake was born in Manchester on April 17 1940, and developed a passion for drawing. She studied at the College of Art and Design in the city then, inspired by seeing Audrey Hepburn in the film Funny Face, secured a placement as an intern in London with the theatrical costumiers, Berman’s.
Her first steps in the film industry were as assistant costume designer on two Hammer films, the child-abuse drama Never Take Sweets From a Stranger (1960) and the 1961 horror The Shadow of My Cat.
Uncredited work on My Fair Lady (1964) was followed by Judith (1966), in which Sophia Loren played a woman out to track down her husband in Palestine after the war. Yvonne Blake dressed her in clothes she had found in a kibbutz. The same year, she also worked on Francois Truffaut’s adaptation of the Ray Bradbury story, Fahrenheit 451, with its futuristic design.
In 1969 she worked on Richard Quine’s 1969 comedy western A Talent for Loving (also known as Gun Crazy, it had been offered as a vehicle for the Beatles to Brian Epstein, who rejected it). Quine’s assistant, the Spaniard Gil Carretero, was detailed to translate for her while she sourced fabrics for her costumes. They fell in love and married and settled in Spain.
Her work in the 1970s included a thriller starring Elizabeth Taylor, Night Watch (1973). The star’s contract specified that she could keep whatever she wore for the film – and so, Blake recalled, she wanted to wear Valentino.
“She liked to wear lots of things: the earrings, the necklace, all of the jewels … I would tell her that she couldn’t wear it all. She couldn’t understand it, and asked why not. ‘Well, because this character is a very normal woman and she would not wear an elegant Valentino dress to watch television with her husband,’ I said. ‘But I would,’ she said. ‘You would, but not your character,’ I replied. I had to get strict with her.”
Her other films included Jesus Christ Superstar (1973), Robin and Marian (1976), starring Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn (the most elegant of her actresses, she said), The Eagle Has Landed (1976), and Superman II (1980). Meanwhile for television her work included Onassis: The Richest Man in the World (1988), Casanova (1987), Crime of the Century (1996) and James Dean (2001).
She won four Goya Awards, the Spanish Oscars, including one for Remando al Viento (“Rowing With the Wind”, 1988), the film which brought Hugh Grant and Liz Hurley together (Grant was an unlikely Lord Byron, while Hurley played his lover, Claire Clairmont). She was also nominated four times for a Bafta and twice for an Emmy.
She became something of a cinematic institution in Spain, liked for her easy, smiling charm, and in 2012 she became the first nonactress to receive the country’s National Cinematography Award. The citation noted her “rigour, elegance and creativity”, and when she went up to take the award she shook her fist in the air and declared that she shared the honour with all the female technicians: “We also count,” she declared.
In 2016 she was elected unopposed as President of the Spanish Film Academy, working hard to resolve several disputes within the organisation. She felt, she said, that she had more faith in the Spanish film industry than many Spaniards did.
Yvonne Blake is survived by her husband, Gil Carretero, and their son.