Terence Marsh
Art director who shared Oscar glories for the memorable sets used in Doctor Zhivago and Oliver!
TERENCE MARSH, who has died aged 86, was an Oscar-winning British film art director and production designer with a career spanning five decades.
His work included some of the most memorable productions of the 20th century, ranging from epic set pieces for Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965) in Spain to period comedies for Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder, the prisons of
The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and The Green Mile (1999), and the claustrophobia of submarines for
The Hunt for Red October (1990).
Film design has been called “the invisible art”, and Marsh’s cinematic worlds were all the more miraculous for having been largely created before CGI imagery existed. He used to say: “If you can see what I’ve done, I haven’t done my work properly.”
Marsh’s craft was so successful that most people accepted that the prison confines of The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile were filmed on location. A Man for All Seasons in 1966, starring Paul Scofield as Thomas More, marked another triumph of cinematic sleight-of-hand. Unable to shoot Fred Zinnemann’s film at Hampton Court, Marsh and John Box, the film’s production designer, created an equivalent in the studio from painted flats and archways.
Marsh’s ingenuity was equally stretched on his work for the notoriously demanding director David Lean, and he earned his spurs working with Box on Lawrence of Arabia. “I built Aqaba,” said Marsh, which was no mean feat: he transformed the Andalusian seaside town of Almería into the Red Sea port. (He also appeared in the film as Peter O’toole’s double, furiously riding Lawrence’s motorbike.)
For Doctor Zhivago, he supervised another huge construction project, a convincing recreation of turn-of-thecentury Moscow built in perspective, complete with houses, cobblestone streets and working trams, on the 10-acre site of a future housing estate near Madrid.
Terence George Thomas Marsh was born in London on November 14 1931, the only child of George and his wife Sheila (née Mullen). His father was a printer’s journeyman and his Irish mother was a stand-in for female stars such as Patricia Roc.
Young Terry inherited good looks, a lively personality, and a bubbly sense of humour. He also displayed artistic talent from an early age. Film was another lifelong passion; he decided on his career as soon as he noticed the on-screen credit “art director”.
Leaving Kilburn Grammar School at 16, he briefly worked as a fledgling draughtsman at Shepherd’s Bush until Rank sold the studio to the BBC.
Architectural studies at Willesden College of Technology and National Service in the RAF then intervened. But he returned to his chosen path in 1954, hired as a draughtsman at Pinewood, where he spent six years learning his craft on films including The Prince and the Showgirl (1957) and A Night to Remember (1958). He remembered those years as a terrific training ground, learning to deal with everything from blueprints and budgets to storyboarding, and from scenic painting and set dressing to mastering special effects.
In 1960 he left Pinewood to go freelance. His career really took off when he was hired by Box to join the Lawrence of Arabia team, first in Jordan, then in Spain. His imagination was well-suited to the art of ingenious solutions, and stood him in good stead for the glory years of the 1960s, working with his mentor on some of the decade’s top films.
For Lawrence of Arabia, Marsh oversaw 300 Spanish workmen as they built a railway, cleared a riverbed, and built a city. By the end of the film Box, known as “the magician”, had full confidence in Marsh’s talents and elevated him to his “number two”. He had found the perfect sorcerer’s apprentice, and later Box glowingly recalled their close collaboration.
In 1968, on Carol Reed’s massive Dickensian musical Oliver!, Marsh was deputy commander of “Box’s army”, a 350-strong team who constructed the sprawling atmospheric sets of Victorian London at Shepperton. After Oliver!, Box encouraged him to go independent, and secured him an agent – a process Marsh later repeated for his 1970s assistant Stuart Craig, now renowned for the Harry Potter film series.
For the Second World War drama
A Bridge Too Far (1977), filmed on location in the Netherlands, Marsh and his team had to make gliders from scratch, and fill out the ranks of Sherman tanks with fibreglass equivalents fitted over Volkswagen chassis. The Cold War thriller The Hunt for Red October (1990) was another challenge. How to make submarines visually arresting? Marsh transformed the “up periscope” genre’s monochrome interiors by introducing beige and biscuit hues, and inventively augmenting the regulation overhead lighting with under-floor illumination.
Marsh’s talent and experience were prized by all his collaborators. He made six films with Gene Wilder, who described his first encounter with Marsh in 1974 as “like meeting my long-lost brother”. Frank Darabont, director of The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, once said that without Marsh “there would have been no Shawshank to redeem, no mile to walk”.
Marsh shared Oscars with John Box for their work on Doctor Zhivago and Oliver! In 2010 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Art Directors Guild in Hollywood; it was presented to him by Wilder.
In private life Marsh painted and sketched every day, even doodling when he was on the phone. As his wife Sandra loved Venice, he decorated the bedroom of his London flat with a veduta mural, “so she could wake up there every morning”. A convivial figure, he played the trumpet, was an excellent bowler and a skilled recreational tennis player. He excelled at film trivia, and one treasured memory was meeting the “sweet and shy” Marilyn Monroe at the wrap party for The Prince and the Showgirl in 1957.
Marsh moved to America in 1976, but kept a flat in London. He is survived by his second wife, of 42 years, Sandra (née Rogers), and by three daughters from his first marriage to Lorna (née Wrapson); his eldest daughter pre-deceased him.
Terence Marsh, born November 14 1931, died January 9 2018