Phyllis Dalton, ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ and ‘Doctor Zhivago’ Costume Designer, Dies at 99
Phyllis Dalton, the revered British costume designer who created Peter O’Toole‘s iconic white desert robe for David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia and won Oscars 24 years apart for her work on Lean’s Doctor Zhivago and Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V, has died. She was 99.
Dalton died Thursday, The Telegraph reported. No other details were immediately available.
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During her storied 50-year-plus career, Dalton also received an Oscar and BAFTA nomination for Carol Reed’s Victorian-era best picture winner Oliver! (1968); won a BAFTA for The Hireling (1973), set in post-World War 1; and landed an Emmy for Clive Donner’s 1982 telefilm The Scarlet Pimpernel, which takes place amid the French Revolution.
She started out as a wardrobe assistant on Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (1944) and got her first costume designer credit dressing Richard Todd and Glynis Johns on Rob Roy: The Highland Rogue (1953). She even aided the legendary Edith Head on Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956).
Dalton received praise for the swashbuckling costumes in Rob Reiner’s The Princess Bride (1987) and partnered three times with director Kenneth Branagh (also co-starring opposite then-wife Emma Thompson) on Henry V (1989), the neo-noir thriller Dead Again (1991) and the romantic comedy Much Ado About Nothing (1993), her final screen credit.
During a 2012 BAFTA tribute to her, it was humorously noted that she had clothed literal armies of stars onscreen — “the Red Army, the British Army, the U.S. Army, the Cossacks, the Nazis, the Afghans, the Knights of the Round Table — twice — the Jacobites and the Jacobins …”
Dalton wasn’t even nominated for her most recognizable work — the precision military costumes and Arab wear she designed for Lawrence of Arabia (1962).
The film received 10 Oscar nominations and won the prizes for best picture, director, cinematographer (Freddie Young), art direction (John Box, John Stoll, Dario Simoni), sound (John Cox), editing (Anne V. Coates) and score (Maurice Jarre).
In a letter, Lean wrote to her expressing his disappointment at the lack of recognition: “I blame Columbia and [producer] Sam [Spiegel] for not somehow getting you nominated for your wonderful job. You did it so beautifully that I think they failed to realize every costume was an original by you.”
To prepare for the epic, Dalton studied T.E. Lawrence’s photographs housed in the Imperial War Museum in London and analyzed Eric Kennington’s pastel illustrations in his book Seven Pillars of Wisdom, first published in 1926.
The perfectionist even tracked down the original tailor of Lawrence’s commander, Gen. Edmund Allenby, then working in a London clothing store.
When it came to designing O’Toole’s officer uniform, Dalton deliberately made it ill-fitting, ran it through a washing machine to shrink it, creased it and made his trouser legs too short.
“It was terribly important, because it told you immediately that he was a misfit,” she said in the film’s making-of documentary.
Her design of O’Toole’s full-length desert robe outfit included gold brocade trim, a long silk shirt (created in London and embroidered with a white silk pattern in Damascus), a fine cream wool keffiyeh with an ivory wool and gilt agal.
She masterfully reflected Lawrence’s deteriorating mental and moral decline through the movie by making his robes progressively thinner and soiled.
Ever resourceful, Dalton would order two dozen silk shirts to ensure at least six arrived to her liking, as the Damascus tailors would often attempt to improve their adornment without her permission, she said.
The only costume in the film that was entirely fictious was Anthony Quinn’s (Auda Abu Tayi) black and blue abaya, as Dalton felt it looked magnificent against the desert backdrop. “That was my only bit of self-indulgence, I suppose,” she said.
She even dressed the hundreds of Arabs seen onscreen. “Lots of people think the Arabs all wore their own clothes, but that was another case of being 10 identical outfits for everybody, for all the Arabs, all in Lawrence’s gang, anyway,” she said in a 2000 interview.
Phyllis Margaret Dalton was born on Oct. 16, 1925, in Chiswick, England. Her father worked for the Great Western Railway, her mother in a bank. As a child, she was fascinated with drawing clothes and learning about how people dressed in the past and the fabrics they used.
At Ealing Art College, she studied costume design, then picked up work as an assistant for fashion designer Matilda Etches in her Soho workroom, making clothes for dancers Margot Fonteyn and Pamela May, actresses Ivy St. Helier and Renée Asherson and Olivier’s Henry V.
During World War II, she enlisted for the Women’s Royal Naval Service and served at the code-breaking facility at Bletchley Park.
A big break came when her aunt entered her into a Vogue talent contest and her work caught the eye of editor Audrey Withers, who introduced her to designer Yvonne Caffin at Gainsborough Studios.
She began as her assistant, shopping for ready-made clothes for The Huggetts film series before moving to Twickenham Studios and receiving her first film credit as wardrobe supervisor on the Robert Montgomery 1950 courtroom drama Eye Witness.
It was on Rob Roy three years later that she found her feet artistically, using color to create mood and character with “all those plaids with their lovely vegetable dyes,” she told the Sunday Telegraph in 1990.
On Hitchcock’s remake of his own The Man Who Knew Too Much, “he was so deadpan, he’d be telling you terrible things about these people in the script and you weren’t awfully sure whether to believe him or not, whether he was serious or not,” she said.
Her Oscar-nominated work on the musical Oliver! was made easier, she said, because of Charles Dickens’ vivid descriptions of his characters and settings in his 1838 novel Oliver Twist.
Across five dozen films and telefilms, Dalton dressed an eclectic list of stars — James Mason (1965’s Lord Jim), Anthony Hopkins (1982’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame), No?l Coward and Maureen O’Hara (1959’s Our Man in Havana), Douglas Fairbanks Jr. (1986’s Strong Medicine), Joan Fontaine and Dorothy Dandridge (1957’s Island in the Sun), Charlton Heston (1980’s The Awakening) and even Andre the Giant (The Princess Bride).
The Princess Bride, of course, starred Cary Elwes as the farmhand Westley, who rescues his true love, Princess Buttercup (Robin Wright), from Prince Humperdinck (Chris Sarandon). When Dalton first read the script, she thought it was “a load of rubbish.”
Yet in his 2014 memoir As You Wish, Elwes recalled how her costume sketches instantly “nailed the tone and feel of [William] Goldman‘s book. The colors, textures and the look of the materials were beyond what I had imagined.”
After she fitted Elwes in his character’s iconic all-black costume of suede pants, leather boots, belt, laced ruffled shirt, gloves and mask, she still felt the outfit was unfinished.
“She then called over her assistant and asked her to go fetch some black satin,” Elwes wrote. “When the assistant returned with the material, Phyllis tied one piece around my head and another around my waist like a sash. ‘There,’ she said, ‘that’s better!'”
Not to be outdone, she modified a shoe to protect Elwes’ broken toe suffered, not during filming, but while he was driving Andre the Giant’s all-terrain vehicle during some time off.
Filmgoers to this day gush over the gorgeous pale pink suit and fluffy pink marabou she designed for Geraldine Chaplin for her first appearance at the Moscow train station in Doctor Zhivago (1965).
Dalton’s initial sketch had been more sophisticated — a black fluffy hat and a very tight pearl grey outfit, but she was overruled by Lean.
Two days before shooting, Chaplin’s ball dress, in a box also containing Rod Steiger’s trousers, was lost at London Airport (now Heathrow). Dalton called it “one of the worst things that’s ever happened, you don’t expect this.” Another dress was manufactured overnight and shipped from Madrid.
Across a 15-month period, she created more than 5,000 costumes for Doctor Zhivago, including a dozen basic designs of soldiers’ uniforms, which she then individualized with tears and tatters.
“It’s not really so strange that a woman should design men’s clothing,” she told the San Francisco Examiner before the film’s release. “Actually, it takes a feminine woman to know what a masculine man should look like.”
Surprisingly, across her entire career, it was the costume of a Russian soldier that pleased Dalton the most. “Anyone can make a smart frock,” she said in the program for her BAFTA salute.
“It’s much more difficult to make people from the past who are wearing ordinary clothes look real. So I guess I was more proud of that soldier than anything.”
She retired in 1993 and was recognized with an MBE in 2002 for her services to the film industry. Survivors include her second husband, Christopher.
Of her own attention to detail, Dalton used an example of “having the mud in the right place” to illustrate the subtlety of her craft.
“You’ve got to think what color the mud would really have been, make it in the place where it happened. You’ve got to match your soldiers to mud — or your Arabs to desert, as in Lawrence of Arabia. Deserts aren’t all yellow. I didn’t know that until I went to Jordan.”
It was serendipity that caused Dalton to land the coveted costume designer gig on Lawrence of Arabia.
Neither the wardrobe master nor production designer (Box) were available for Albert Finney‘s unsuccessful screen test of the title character. Production manager John Palmer remembered Dalton from their time working on Island in the Sun and recommended her to Lean.
Dalton stepped into what she called “a production in itself lasting for several days” and soon was offered the costume designer position for the two-year shoot by Spiegel.
In Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni’s 2003 biography of Spiegel, Dalton said the producer was “an absolute monster, but he had an awful lot of charm. … He did have one or two parties on his boat, but when he’d had enough, he’s stand on the gangplank with a watch in his hand.”
When Lawrence’s running time was returned to its original 228 minutes as part of its 1988 director’s cut, Dalton watched in amazement at the spectacle she had helped create.
“I sat there and couldn’t believe we’d actually done it,” she said, “because it was a slog at the time, and it is a wonderful film, you know. One has to be fairly proud of it, really, but I can’t believe I did it, having come from nothing much. Where did it come from?”
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