In memoriam: Stuart Craig (Telegraph 24/09/25)

Stuart Craig, who has died aged 83, was a giant of British production design whose ability to conjure highly immersive sets and worlds won him three Oscars and three BAFTAs; as one of the key architects of the Harry Potter series, he led the team that helped bring Hogwarts to blockbusting life.

Craig broke through in his field at the start of the Eighties, with two films that demonstrated his versatility: the Lew Grade-produced, Martin Amis-scripted Saturn 3 and David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (both 1980). While the former’s sexed-up sci-fi nosedived, the latter’s enveloping recreation of a soot-blackened Victorian London garnered Craig his first Oscar nomination and BAFTA win.

He rapidly became an industry go-to, bolstering a succession of globetrotting Britfilm landmarks. With Robert Laing and Michael Seirton, he shared an Oscar for the handsome, Lean-like art direction of Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982) before going on to tackle the comparably grand historical designs of Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984) and The Mission (1986).

A second Oscar, shared with Gérard James, followed for his sumptuous work on Stephen Frears’ Dangerous Liaisons (1988), underlining Craig’s period credentials. “In this country, we’ve become very adept at the look of a period film,” Craig told the academic Jane Barnwell in 2010. “We’re good at pattern and aging and the effect of the atmosphere on the architecture – the way moss grows, the way rain runs, and the stains it leaves behind.”

That eye for historical authenticity served Craig well into the Nineties: he reunited with Attenborough on Chaplin (1992) and Shadowlands (1993), where he installed Anthony Hopkins’ CS Lewis in a retrofitted CFA Voysey house. Gorgeously blending locations with sets, Craig’s designs for Agnieszka Holland’s The Secret Garden (1993) set a high bar for family films; the Gothic look Craig proposed for Frears’ horror-inflected biopic Mary Reilly (1996) was arguably more compelling than the drama.

That same year, Craig excelled himself with Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient (1996), shot on location in Tunisia and Italy. This sweeping WW2 epic illustrated Craig’s facility with scale: his work encompassed both the vast Saharan Cave of Swimmers, with its prehistoric daubings, and the rustic simplicity of the bedroom in which Ralph Fiennes’ wounded Count Almásy recuperates.

A third Oscar resulted, shared with Stephenie McMillan, the set decorator Craig had met on Chaplin and subsequently collaborated with on the Potter films: “I haven’t worked with another set decorator in fifteen years,” Craig told an interviewer in 2007. “I’d be devastated if I had to work without her.” When McMillan died six years later, it was Craig who penned her Guardian obituary.

Born on April 14, 1942 in Norwich, Stuart Norman Craig studied at Norwich University of the Arts and the Royal College of Art before making swift progress within the film industry. After uncredited work as a draughtsman on the Bond spoof Casino Royale (1967), he was promoted to assistant art director on Scrooge (1970) before serving as art director on A Bridge Too Far (1977) and Superman (1978). 

Following The English Patient’s Oscar sweep, Craig moved into contemporary territory with Notting Hill (1999) before the phone call that changed the course of his career: “I was decorating a bedroom for my as-yet-unborn grandson when I got the call to come to Los Angeles and meet [Harry Potter producer] David [Heyman] and [director] Chris [Columbus]. I read the novel on the plane over. My first reaction was fright: how the hell are we going to do this?” 

A map of Hogwarts sketched by J.K. Rowling on their first meeting helped (“I was still referring to that map ten years later”); Craig’s own draughtsmanship yielded Sirius Black’s “Wanted” poster and the Marauder’s Map. He designed all eight films, winning his second BAFTA for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005), then – at Rowling’s behest – leading the design team for the various Potter theme parks. 

“Because the Leavesden studio was our permanent home, because there was time, because the films were guaranteed to make money, we were in a very privileged position, really, to experiment and to test things,” Craig reflected upon the series’ conclusion. He received an OBE in 2003 and lifetime achievement awards from the Art Directors’ Guild in 2008 and the British Film Designers’ Guild in 2018. 

He continued working after a 2011 diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, designing all three of the Potter-adjacent Fantastic Beasts films, winning a third BAFTA (with set decorator Anna Pinnock) for the series’ 2016 opener. His final credit was Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (2022).

Though the logistics of his job grew complex, Craig confessed he adhered to a simple process: “I often start with a sheet of blank paper and without an idea in my head at all. Sometimes I’ll have a flash of inspiration, but it’s rare. So I just make a mark and rub it out; then make another mark, and add another, and then rub one of those out. It’s an incredibly faltering process towards something.”

He is survived by his wife of sixty years Patricia Stangroom, and their two daughters Becky and Laura.

Stuart Craig, born April 14, 1942, died September 7, 2025.