10 Reasons to Remember Terence Marsh (1931-2018)

13 Saturday Jan 2018

Tags

Academy Awards, Art director, Career, David Lean, Movies, Production designer

Terence Marsh (14 November 1931 – 9 January 2018)

It’s easy to forget when watching a movie that what you’re actually looking at, the physical environment that the cast is working within, has either been designed or adapted to look how it does by the production designer, or art director as they’re otherwise known. A production designer works closely with a movie’s director to ensure that the visual look and style of a movie suits the material and communicates, where necessary, a mood or tone. It’s a challenging job, and Terence Marsh was one of the best in his particular corner of the movie industry.

Marsh began his career as a draughtsman at Pinewood Studios, where he worked uncredited on a number of movies including A Town Like Alice (1956) and The League of Gentlemen (1960). In the early Sixties he began to work as an assistant art director, and he gained his first on-screen credit for Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Three years later he had become a fully-fledged art director and won the first of two Academy Awards for his work on Doctor Zhivago (1965) (Marsh must have really impressed David Lean with his work). His second Academy Award came three years later with Oliver! (1968). For this, he oversaw the building of a London street that was carried out by around three hundred and fifty men and which included the laying of around ten thousand cobblestone slabs.

Marsh worked continuously from the Sixties onwards, and in a variety of genres, bringing his attention to detail and visual acuity to a number of movies that were improved just by his work on them. During his career he collaborated with the likes of Richard Attenborough, Sydney Pollack, Frank Darabont, Carol Reed, Gene Wilder, John McTiernan, Paul Verhoeven and Mel Brooks, and always did his best to match his vision of a movie to theirs. He remained at the top of his game even in the Nineties, whether it was through riding out in a Trident-class nuclear submarine for The Hunt for Red October (1990), or designing “Old Sparky” the electric chair for The Green Mile (1999). For his expertise and his apparently infallible skill in picking the right environment to suit the tone or the mood of a movie, or even just an individual scene, Marsh will be sorely missed.

1 – Doctor Zhivago (1965)

2 – Oliver! (1968)

3 – Mary, Queen of Scots (1971)

4 – A Touch of Class (1973)

5 – The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother (1975)

6 – To Be or Not to Be (1983)

7 – The Hunt for Red October (1990)

8 – Basic Instinct (1992)

9 – The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

10 – The Green Mile (1999)

10 Reasons to Remember Ken Adam (1921-2016)

12 Saturday Mar 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Albert "Cubby" Broccoli, Career, James Bond, Ken Adam, Production designer, RAF, William Cameron Menzies, World War II

Ken Adam (5 February 1921 – 10 March 2016)

One of the movie industry’s most accomplished and creative production designers, Ken Adam was responsible for some of the most iconic images seen on screens over the last sixty years. During World War II he was one of only three German-born pilots allowed to fly for the RAF (and was trained by Michael Rennie). After the war he began his career in the movie industry as a draughtsman on This Was a Woman (1948), a modest British crime drama starring Sonia Dresdel. From there he did a lot of uncredited work on movies as varied as Dick Barton Strikes Back (1949) and The Crimson Pirate (1952) before landing a job supporting the esteemed William Cameron Menzies as an art director on Mike Todd’s ambitious and lavish Around the World in Eighty Days (1956). Menzies inspired Adam to “forget my inhibitions and let myself go”. This proved to be wise counsel indeed, and Adam continued to work on lavish movie projects like Ben-Hur (1959) (albeit still uncredited).

With his career beginning to take off, and his work attracting significant notice, Adam struck gold with his work on The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960), a movie that introduced him to producer Albert “Cubby” Broccoli. When Broccoli needed a production designer for a movie he was making about a spy created by Ian Fleming, he approached Adam, who took the job even though he felt he was “prostituting” himself. Dr. No (1962) proved to be the first of seven Bond movies Adam worked on, and each one earned him an increasing level of recognition, especially Blofeld’s volcano lair in You Only Live Twice (1967). But while his lasting association with the Bond movies cemented his reputation, Adam was equally adept at working with directors of the calibre of Stanley Kubrick, Herbert Ross and Norman Jewison. As his career progressed he won two Oscars – for Barry Lyndon (1975) and The Madness of King George (1994) – and in 2003 he was knighted. His style was always to marry the old and the new in ever more unusual ways, while somehow managing to retain a feeling for the now. He could be grandiose for Bond, and yet equally at home with something less visually dramatic, such as Agnes of God (1985). He was an original, a talented individual that producers and directors could always rely on to give them something unexpected, and unexpectedly brilliant… such as the car in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), and how much more unexpectedly brilliant was that?