Phyllis Dalton, who has died aged 99, was a costume designer whose work on film earned her two Academy Awards: for Doctor Zhivago (1966), the second of two major assignments for the director David Lean, and for Henry V (1989), the first of three collaborations with Kenneth Branagh.
Both were projects from the more spectacular end of the Dalton wheelyard, involving oversight of sizeable costume departments and hundreds of extras. More commonly, Dalton specialised in a form of period dress that dutifully sublimated the necessary hours of research and unshowily devoted itself to conjuring up a particular era.
Hers was the kind of fundamentally practical costuming that didn’t fall apart amid multiple takes of a frenetic battle scene, that had a lived-in quality rarely noted in reviews but essential to establishing the credibility of a film’s world. As Dalton put it: “Anyone can make a smart frock; it’s much more difficult to make people from the past who are wearing ordinary clothes look real.”
On Doctor Zhivago, Dalton played a vital part in evoking the Russian revolution and its aftermath, though this wasn’t her first largescale Lean collaboration. Four years before, she had been the costume designer on Lawrence of Arabia (1962), where – among other items – she sourced and styled the pristine white headscarves that popped so indelibly against the film’s cinnamon desertscapes.
On behalf of her director, she played a crafty but undeniably effective tailor’s trick, stitching Peter O’Toole’s Army duds a size too small to signify Lawrence’s growing discomfort with military duty; she later placed the actor in ever lighter robes, to suggest a figure evaporating under a relentless sun.
But, as Dalton revealed, this was only a small part of the work required to fill Lean’s monumental frames: “One of the things was we did actually dress absolutely every last person you see on that screen… Lots of people think the Arabs all wore their own clothes, but that was another case of [there] being ten identical outfits for everybody.”
If anything, Zhivago was a more ambitious and challenging production yet. Over the course of the project, Dalton and her team delivered 3,000 costumes and 35,000 individual items of clothing; both Omar Sharif’s title character and Julie Christie’s Lara had ninety costume changes apiece. The challenge was even greater for attempting to reconstruct Russian winters while filming in Spain at the height of summer: Dalton was personally stationed to keep an eye on extras shrugging off their heavy furs in the sweltering Soria heat.
In a 2000 interview, she evoked her back-and-forths with Lean, in discussing the pink marabou worn by Geraldine Chaplin’s Tonya: “I originally did a much more sophisticated design because I thought she’d been at finishing school in Paris. She had a lovely big black sort of fluffy hat and a very tight, very pale pearl grey outfit. But David said he wanted her [in] white or pink or something. I said she can’t sit [wearing that] in the train all that time, and that was me being boring, really. In the end, you know, obviously you give in, and I did the pink outfit and he loved it.”
Such flexibility occasioned Dalton her first Academy Award; with Branagh’s Henry V, she was closing the circle, having previously served as a wardrobe assistant on Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film. Such experience made Dalton invaluable. According to producer David Parfitt, Branagh’s emergent Renaissance company, newcomers to cinema, had the idea “to surround ourselves with the very best people, on the assumption they would know what they were doing, and therefore cover our arses”.
In wartime London, Dalton had had to raid Old Compton Street’s button shops to decorate Renée Asherson; she now had a small fortune with which to bestow additional sparkle upon Emma Thompson’s Catherine of Valois. Again, though, Dalton mostly devoted her efforts to accurately serving the period: “One of the most important things about the job is that no-one should really notice the costumes, unless it’s a film about fashion, of course, where you’re supposed to.” Any singling out, praise or prize was deemed “a bit of a backhanded compliment, really”.
She was born Phyllis Margaret Dalton in Chiswick on October 16, 1925, elder of two children to a railwayman father and a mother who worked in a bank during the war years. After failing her eleven-plus exam, she was privately schooled in Uxbridge before studying dressmaking at the Ealing College of Art.
During WW2, Dalton began Wren training at Bletchley Park, which she confessed to finding “unbelievably boring”. An early instructor of hers said she hoped her new charge didn’t have “an artistic temperament”, and her creativity was limited to heating her bunk with lemonade bottles topped up with hot water: “I never thought the work was for me, but as there was a war on, we got on with it.”
Towards the war’s end, however, there was a stroke of luck. A grandmother entered Dalton in a fashion journalism competition in British Vogue; though her writings didn’t win, they impressed editor Audrey Withers enough to introduce Dalton to Elizabeth Haffenden, then costume designer at Gainsborough Studios in Islington.
Upon being demobbed, Dalton was taken on as a wardrobe assistant, eventually working her way up to designing in her own right. She went solo on the low-budget Rank thriller The Dark Man (1951), put Richard Todd in tartan for Disney’s Rob Roy, The Highland Rogue (1953), and moved into international production with Darryl Zanuck’s Caribbean-set social drama Island in the Sun (1957), gifting stars Dorothy Dandridge and Joan Collins glamorous swimwear and gowns.
She was responsible for the Army greens of the fondly remembered spy drama Carve Her Name with Pride (1958) and the Navy whites of The World of Suzie Wong (1960); her growing influence on the look of her chosen projects was such that the sailor’s outfit she assembled for Peter O’Toole in Lord Jim (1965) – the right size, this time, but with a top slit suggestively to the navel – found its way onto posters.
She proved more than adaptable as the medium segued from black-and-white into full colour: Carol Reed, arguably post-War British cinema’s second most significant director after Lean, sought out Dalton to provide both the crisp pyjamas and linen suits of Our Man in Havana (1959) and the playful jumble-sale free-for-all of Oliver! (1968), for which Dalton received her second Oscar nomination. (She lost to Danilo Donati’s work on the same year’s Romeo and Juliet.)
She worked more selectively in the 1970s, winning a BAFTA for her spare, elegant tailoring on Alan Bridges’ Palme d’Or-winning adaptation of The Hireling (1973), one of the great lost films of the decade. She returned to epic territory for the ambitious religious yarn Mohammed, Messenger of God (a.k.a. The Message, 1976), dressed the live-action scenes in Lionel Jeffries’ The Water Babies (1978) and had fun with the wacky Disney adventure The Spaceman and King Arthur (1979).
After amusing herself with Kim Novak’s embonpoint on the all-star adaptation of Agatha Christie’s The Mirror Crack’d (1980), Dalton then segued into the burgeoning international TV movie sector, winning an Emmy for her work on Clive Donner’s adaptation of The Scarlet Pimpernel (1982) starring Anthony Andrews, Jane Seymour and Ian McKellen.
She kept a hand in cinema, however, just about protecting her costumes from the pigs wreaking havoc in the Michael Palin comedy A Private Function (1984), and thereafter moving onto The Princess Bride (1987), where she designed a shoe to protect the injured toe of leading man Cary Elwes, and helped an entire generation fall head over heels for an ethereally pretty Robin Wright.
She followed Henry V with two further Branagh projects. On the noir pastiche Dead Again (1991), Dalton expressed some measure of disappointment that costumes designed for colour photography were instead being filmed in monochrome. More happily, the Chianti-shot Much Ado About Nothing (1993) – Dalton’s final credit – punched up the eminently photogenic cast’s tans with light shirts and smocks: “[Ken] wanted them earthy… bosoms nearly hanging out but no corsets, which is quite a problem to do, you know, when you haven’t got any construction.”
A longtime resident of Putney, which she described as halfway between the shops and the studios, she was awarded an MBE in 2002, and in 2012 was the subject of a BAFTA tribute attended by Omar Sharif, Tom Courtenay and Peter Egan, an event she greeted with characteristic self-effacement: “I’m surprised by all this attention… I’ve worked with some wonderful people, not just great directors, but great costumiers and costume assistants. You have to be a team; it’s very important. It’s no good if everyone ruins the look of what you’re doing, which is easily done.”
She was married once, to the theatre producer James Whiteley; they divorced before his death in 1976.
Phyllis Dalton, born October 16, 1925, died January 9, 2025.
