Phyllis Dalton
Phyllis Margaret Dalton was an English costume designer. She received two Academy Awards, a British Academy Film Award, an Emmy Award and was awarded the BAFTA Special Award for Craft in 1994.
Dalton collaborated with directors David Lean, Carol Reed, Rob Reiner, and Kenneth Branagh. She received three nominations for the Academy Award for Best Costume Design, and won twice for Doctor Zhivago and Henry V. She was also nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Costume Design four times, winning for The Hireling.
Life and career
Early years
Dalton was born in Chiswick on 16 October 1925. As a teenager she studied at the Ealing School of Art. After the outbreak of World War II she began training as a Women's [Royal Naval Service|Wren] at the code-breaking facility Bletchley Park which she said she found to be "unbelievably boring".Career
In 1946, after being "demobbed" her grandmother entered her into a competition at Vogue Magazine where she won the opportunity to work as an assistant in the wardrobe department at Gainsborough Studios in Islington. Once there, she began cutting her teeth on films like Brian Desmond Hurst's A Christmas Carol; Alfred Hitchcock's The [Man Who Knew Too Much (1956 film)|The Man Who Knew Too Much] and on Anatole Litvak's Anastasia.Dalton gained notoriety as a costumer in the latter part of the 1950s, making a name for herself on films like Island in the Sun, directed by Robert Rossen, starring James Mason and Joan Fontaine; and Our Man in Havana, directed by Carol Reed, starring Alec Guinness and Noël Coward.
She worked with David Lean on the films: Lawrence of Arabia in 1962, starring Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif; and again three years later on Dr. Zhivago starring Sharif and Julie Christie, for which she won her first Academy Award. For this particular film, Dalton and her team ended up making 3,000 individual costumes and putting together 35,000 individual items of clothing for the extras. The characters of Zhivago and Lara each had approximately 90 costume combinations, and the other six other principal characters had an average of fifteen costume changes each. Because this was before CGI, by the time principal photography ended it was estimated the costume dept. had used up a total of 984 yards of fabric, 300,000 yards of thread, 1 million buttons and 7,000 safety pins.
File:Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia.png|thumbnail|right|Peter O'Toole in one of Dalton's costumes for Lawrence: the sheikh's white robes and keffiyeh given to him by Sherif Ali. Lawrence of Arabia
File:Julie Christie - 1965.jpg|thumbnail|right|Julie Christie in one of Dalton's designs for Dr. Zhivago
File:Fantasy Worlds of Myth and Magic, EMP, Seattle - The Princess Bride.jpg|thumbnail|right|Dalton's costumes for Montoya, Buttercup and Westley for The Princess Bride on display at the EMP Museum, Seattle
In all, Dalton has designed costumes for more than forty films. Other notable ones include Lord Jim again with O'Toole and directed by Richard Brooks, Oliver! with Ron Moody and Oliver Reed directed by Carol Reed; and The Princess Bride directed by Rob Reiner with Cary Elwes and Robin Wright. Other wearers of her creations include Elizabeth Taylor, Kim Novak, Maggie Smith, Emma Thompson, Robin Williams, Keanu Reeves, Denzel Washington and Michael Palin.
Her body of work also includes Rob Roy: [The Highland Rogue], John Paul Jones, The World of Suzie Wong, The Message and Voyage of the Damned, The Mirror Crack'd and The Awakening, A Private Function, and her last credited work, Much Ado About Nothing.
A BAFTA tribute was held in 2012 to celebrate Dalton's contribution to Cinema of [the United Kingdom|British cinema].