Sir Ken Adam
BORN BERLIN, FEBRUARY 5, 1921. DIED LONDON, MARCH 10, 2016, AGED 95
HE SAID yes to Dr No but designer Ken Adam immediately wondered whether he was prostituting himself. The Academy Award winning film designer created sets for the James Bond films which took technology into the stratosphere.
The seven films he designed transcended Ian Fleming’s more muted imagination, transforming his thrillers into darkly futuristic fantasies. There was gadgetry, wizardry and weaponry — and, most of all, — the Bond Aston Martin with bullet-proof shield, tyre shredders and revolving number plates. The piéce de resistance was its ejector seat which propelled 007 and his latest girfriend into some safe and glittering southern sea. In a similar mould was his submersible Lotus Esprit in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and the eponymous Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in the film starring Dick Van Dyck.
Adam’s imaginative leaps thrilled newly inaugurated US President Ronald Reagan, who longed to see the circular war room in Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove (1964) — until told it was a figment of Adam’s imagination. Yet that war room articulated all the terrors of the Cold War era, a nightmare scenario probably rooted in Adam’s own European past.
Born Klaus Hugo Adam to Jewish parents, his father, Fritz Adam had been a highly decorated former cavalry officer in the Kaiser’s army and owned a fashionable department store. His mother Lili (née Saalfeld), had a boarding house. The young Klaus was influenced by the famous architects around him, like Walter Gropius and Erich Mendelsohn. Concepts of shape, light and shade formed his growing sense of fantasy. His father had just commissioned Mies van der Rohe to design a new branch of his store as Hitler came to power. He was arrested and freed through the help of an employee who had become a leading SS officer.
While studying at the Berlin French School Adam saw the Reichstag gutted by fire and persuaded his parents to leave. They came to Scotland before settling in London in 1934. The young Adam attended Craigend Park school in Edinburgh and then St Paul’s School prior to University College, London.
Vincent Korda, the Hungarian-born art director encouraged him to study at the Bartlett School of Architecture but the Second World War loomed. Technically still a German citizen, Adam joined the Pioneer Corps, comprised of Axis nationals, designing bomb shelters, but eventually joined the Royal Air Force as a fighter pilot, risking execution as a German national if he were captured.
He was also one of the first British officers who entered Belsen. He flew Typhoons after D-Day and bravely travelled to Berlin to find his home and family store destroyed.
He met his future wife Maria-Letitzia Moaro on location in Italy and they married in 1952. They had no children.
At the end of the war Adam became a draughtsman in the film industry and eventually art director on Michael Todd’s Around the World in 80 Days. He worked for Albert Broccoli on The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960) and his futuristic Art Deco style was proposed for the Sir Ken Adam: science, fantasy, architecture and films fed his talents first Bond film in the series, Dr No. But his Goldfinger designs won the public imagination. “Films should offer a form of escapism,” he said. His last Bond film was Moonraker (1979).
Sir Norman Foster’s reunified Reichstag design was partly inspired by Adam. His influence is visible in buildings all over the world, from the Lloyd’s building in the city to the skyline of 21st-century Shanghai.
It was film design that brought him acclaim, but Adam regretted that Goldfinger’s Rumpus Room had been transformed by the script into a gas chamber. In Dr Strangelove he maximised the sense of vastness by never displaying the entire set at once. It was for this film and The Ipress File (1965) that he won Baftas.
Essentially, Adam was defined by James Bond, in which he sensed the Fleming stories gradually disappear as the production relied on the visual excitement of the film.
But the Academy Awards were achieved for something subtler; his meticulous research into the 18th century, which won him best direction for Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975), inspired by landscape, painting and music, and Nicholas Hytner’s The Madness of King George (1994). The Bond films may have indulged his imagination, but he later rejected his designs as “complete fantasy”.
Other outstanding examples are Blofield’s supertanker that swallows submarines in The Spy Who Loved Me, possibly evoking his sense of physics. He was appointed OBE in 1995, won the Hollywood directors’ Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002 and was knighted in 2003. He is survived by his wife Maria-Letitzia.