Phyllis Dalton won her first Oscar in 1966 for designing – also abrading, staining, tattering and otherwise making more real – the 5,000-plus costumes of David Lean’s epic movie of Doctor Zhivago.
She clad Tsarist socialites and post-revolutionary masses, and talked extras out of shedding their Russian army greatcoats on location shooting in a hot Spanish summer. The star Julie Christie was uncomfortable in a sultry red satin gown vital to the story. Dalton and Lean persuaded her that her character would be ill at ease in it too, for the same reasons – sex and shame– so she should just let the dress inspire her performance.
Film designers often explain that their most important job is dealing with actors’ feelings, and the costumes of Dalton, who has died aged 99, could provide actors with psychological profiles for their characters.
Elegant Peter O’Toole, cast as the lead in Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962), enters as an awkward gawk in a crumpled British uniform, which Dalton shrunk so it was too short at the ankles and wrists. Once robed loosely in fine pale wool, gold-trimmed, with Damascus-embroidered silk tunic, he is transformed into myth. Clothes maketh the hero.
Lean thought Dalton should have won an Oscar for Lawrence, with its prodigious logistics – multiples of costumes for each of the many extras as well as the principals, in natural, desert-toned fabrics, constructed and embellished in well-researched styles of different Bedouin tribes; more than three hours of supersharp images in Panavision 70mm meant every garment had to reward the eye.
Dalton preferred Lawrence of Arabia to Zhivago not least because its few merely glimpsed female extras wore hats or headdresses, so no inescapably modern hairstyle broke the period spell.
Dalton had been in the business for nearly two decades by the time Lean called her, in a hurry, to dress a screen test for Lawrence. Drawing and researching clothes from other times or places had absorbed her childhood (her interest in current fashion was somewhat anthropological). She was born in Chiswick, west London, where her father, William, worked for the Great Western Railway, her mother, Elizabeth (nee Mason) in a bank, and went to school locally.
After studying design at Ealing Art College, she sewed for the couturier Matilda Etches, who also did theatre and film costumes. Dalton’s first film experience was searching Soho’s wartime-depleted haberdashery stockists for details for Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (1944).
She enlisted in the Wrens, and was directed to Bletchley Park. Meanwhile, her artwork had been entered in a Vogue talent contest. Dalton did not win it, but the editor gave her an introduction to Gainsborough Studios, which she joined when demobbed, moving later to Twickenham Studios.
For her first credited period design, Rob Roy: The Highland Rogue (1953), she presented Walt Disney productions with subdued lichen-dyed tartans and a surprisingly era-correct white satin gown for the Jacobite outlaw’s wife, Mary (Glynis Johns).
In period films, Dalton’s sympathies were usually with the lower orders and, in pictures with exotic locales, with the locals. In Island in the Sun (1957), set in the Caribbean, Our Man in Havana (1959), in Cuba, and The World of Suzie Wong (1960), in Hong Kong, her colonials were stiff in uniforms and London-tailored suits, and their wives, daughters and secretaries Mayfair oversmart, whereas locals’ clothes had a modern ease in cut and fabric.
Her narrow cheongsams in bright silks for Suzie Wong and her fellow “hostesses” prefigured young fashions of the 1960s.
Dalton worked chiefly in the past through the 60s and 70s, yet interacted with contemporary fashion: Zhivago’s fur hats, boots and long, mighty coats attracted huge publicity just as the modish mood turned romantic, and the styles influenced Paris couture and London boutiques.
Her women’s costumes of the 1830s for Oliver! (1968), amply skirted in printed cotton, caught fashion on its way to the Laura Ashley milkmaid period.
She deserved an Oscar for The Hireling (1973), a drama of class in the 20s, which, with Sarah Miles in soft greige crepe caring for Robert Shaw in an iron-hard chauffeur’s uniform, was bound to end in tragedy.
As a freelance, Dalton went into prestige made-for-television films in the 80s, occasionally returning to the big screen. A pale apron she wrapped round Maggie Smith for her confrontation with an incontinent pig in A Private Function (1984) was a brilliant joke: the film was set in 1947, a year when Dalton’s own assignment had been to buy ready-made clothes for Gainsborough’s Huggett Family comedies. She recreated all their worst aspects.
In The Princess Bride (1987), she reduced fairytale-wear to prototypical essentials, and improvised swashbuckler Cary Elwes’s black satin bandana and sash impromptu. She also borrowed a mudcaked approach to medieval warriors which had been new in the 70s, and for Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V (1989) took this idea seriously, enquiring into the soil colour of the miry fields the English army had been marching in.
Branagh meant his film as a dark opposite to Olivier’s heraldic Technicolor, so Dalton’s court robes were sombre, the battle-wear broken-down to the last thread: they helped Branagh deglorify every scene. She won her second Oscar for them, and designed two more films for Branagh, Dead Again (1991), and Much Ado About Nothing (1993), its rustic Italian garb from no particular past time white in the sun.
Dalton was appointed MBE in 2002, and given a Bafta tribute in 2012.
Her marriage to the theatre producer James Whiteley ended in divorce; he died in 1976. Her second husband, Christopher Synge Barton, survives her.
• Phyllis Dalton, costume designer, born 16 October 1925; died 9 January 2025
