Anthony Powell, Oscar-winning designer of exotic costumes for a string of films including Tess, Death on the Nile and 101 Dalmatians – obituary

Anthony Powell, who has died aged 85, was an internationally acclaimed British costume designer who gave period authenticity to George Cukor’s Travels with my Aunt (1972) starring Maggie Smith, John Guillermin’s all-star Agatha Christie adaptation Death on the Nile (1978) and Roman Polanski’s Tess (1979), starring Nastassja Kinski as Thomas Hardy’s heroine – winning Oscars for all three.

An assiduous researcher who would spent endless hours in the archives and museum clothing collections, he was concerned to reproduce the look of an era as accurately and interestingly as possible (though he once observed that “if you showed audiences how people really looked in the 18th century they would be repulsed – or so distracted they couldn’t concentrate on anything else”). He was not interested in prehistoric romps or futuristic fantasy. Everything he did was based on reality – historical reality and the reality of the characters portrayed.

But he had most fun working with Glenn Close on the series of costumes she wore in 101 Dalmatians (1996) and 102 Dalmatians (2000), as the fur-crazed Cruella de Vil, for which he adapted and exaggerated haute couture styles to outrageous and comic effect.

Powell had worked with the actress, designing her wardrobe for her Broadway role as the ageing diva Norma Desmond in the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Sunset Boulevard, for which he was nominated for a Tony Award. He recalled that when Glenn Close was asked to play Cruella, she asked him whether he thought she should do it: “I said, ‘When in our entire careers have we been given carte blanche to completely go over the top? Wouldn’t that be fun?’ ”

For the first Dalmatians film, Powell, working with his longtime collaborator, the costume maker Barbara Matera, created eight costumes for Cruella, ranging from Chanel-inspired tweed to beaded organza gowns, mostly featuring animal motifs and accompanied by lavish quantities of fur, feathers or snakeskin. To achieve Cruella’s long, thin spiky look he corseted Glenn Close’s waist to 21 inches and built up her shoulders, adding, as finishing touches, hugely long fingernails protruding from gloved hands and four-inch stiletto heels.

“When we started,” Powell recalled, “Glenn said the most chilling thing to me. She told me, ‘Just do the clothes, make-up, and hair, then I’ll look in the mirror and decided how I’m going to play it.’ That’s a lot of responsibility.”

The actress gave Powell much of the credit for her wildly over-the-top performance, explaining that “the process of getting into the character of Cruella every day was definitely to do with the costume.”

When they were invited to reprise the character, they had little hesitation in accepting, though the brief, for 14 costumes, was more challenging, as the beginning of 102 Dalmatians sees Cruella, after a stint in jail, as “Ella”, a reformed character with an aversion to fur. Naturally, though, in the course of the film she gradually reverts to the old Cruella.

“The trick,” Powell recalled, “was in trying to make the politically correct Cruella amusing and entertaining” and then “gradually transforming [her outfits] into what Cruella would wear.”

Thus, as Ella leaves prison she is dressed in a kind of nun’s habit, with an outsize wimple – though the fact that it is backless indicates that the reform process might still have some way to go. The costumes (including a “PC” substitute for a fur coat, fashioned from bubble wrap, black bin bags, and “House of De Vil” shopping bags) become increasingly outrageous, culminating in a stunning scarlet, jewel and ostrich feather evening dress in which the full-strength Cruella makes a dramatic comeback at a dogs’ dinner party – an outfit the actress described as “one of the greatest costumes I’ll ever wear”.

His work on the second film and on Steven Spielberg’s Hook, in which he patterned the distinctive look of the title character (played by Dustin Hoffman) on portraits of Charles II, won Powell two further Oscar nominations.

Anthony Powell was born in Manchester on June 2 1935, the son of Arthur Powell and Alice, née Woodhead, and was educated at William Hulme’s Grammar School, Manchester, and St Andrew’s College, a Presbyterian establishment in Dublin. After National Service as a wireless operator in the British Army of Occupation in Germany, he enrolled at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London.

He then worked as an assistant to Cecil Beaton and Oliver Messel, also lecturing in theatre design at the Central School from 1958 to 1971.

In parallel with his career in costume design, he was involved in design work on building interiors, including working on the restoration and renovation in the 1980s of Sutton Place, the Grade I listed Tudor manor house near Guildford. He also worked with the Earl of Snowdon, a great friend, as an art director on fashion shoots for Issey Miyake.

Powell began his theatrical work designing costumes and sets for operas and plays, mainly in Great Britain and Germany, but also in the US, where his designs for John Gielgud’s Broadway production of Sheridan’s The School for Scandal (1963) earned him, aged 28, a Tony Award for costumes and a nomination for scenic design.

His first Hollywood commission was for costumes for Spanish conquistadors and Incas in Irving Lerner’s Peru-set adaptation of Peter Shaffer’s Royal Hunt of the Sun (1969). After winning his first Oscar with his spectacular costumes for Maggie Smith as Augusta in Travels with My Aunt, he worked on Papillon (1973) with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman and Robert Altman’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (1976).

Maggie Smith became a great friend and he went on to work with her in later films including Death on the Nile, Evil Under the Sun (1982), and Hook, as well as the stage plays Private Lives and Lettice and Lovage. Some of his exquisite costumes for Death on the Nile featured prominently in Agatha Christie and Archaeology, an exhibition held at the British Museum in 2001-2 and on tour in Europe.

Polanski’s Tess won huge acclaim for the earthy palette of browns, greys and pastels in which Powell dressed the film’s stars, evoking Thomas Hardy’s impoverished rural Wessex of the 1870s, and he went on to collaborate with Polanski on Pirates (1986), Frantic (1988), and The Ninth Gate (1999). In 1981 he designed the costumes and sets for a huge and glamorous production of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus in Paris, which Polanski directed and in which he played Mozart.

Powell gained wider recognition with his stylish work on the blockbusting Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), though he was alarmed to be described in publicity material for the first film, as “veteran designer Anthony Powell”, when he was only 45.

For many years Powell worked almost exclusively in films until he was lured back to the theatre by Andrew Lloyd Webber to do the costumes for Sunset Boulevard. Beginning in 1993 with Patti LuPone, who originated the role of Norma Desmond in London, he went on to costume six more Normas including Elaine Page, Petula Clark and Glenn Close – a commitment which meant that he had to turn down numerous film offers.

In the 1952 movie starring Gloria Swanson, the costumes were the height of 1950s Paris fashion. But Powell was inspired by the 1920s-1930s period of Norma’s heyday. So his Norma swept around her mansion in dramatic turbans and stunning floor-length gowns, feathered hats and beaded pyjamas.

Powell’s later film credits included The Avengers (1998), the American spy action film adaptation of the British television series starring Uma Thurman and Ralph Fiennes, and Miss Potter (2006), starring Renee Zellweger as the children’s author Beatrix Potter, whose outfits he based on photographs in a facsimile of her family photograph album.

On stage he designed several hundred glamorous costumes for Trevor Nunn’s spectacular 2002 production of the Cole Porter musical, Anything Goes, at the National Theatre and in 2017 worked on a production of My Fair Lady at the Lyric Opera of Chicago.

Powell, a private man who listed his hobbies in Who’s Who as “music, gardening, collecting, laughing”, was appointed a Royal Designer for Industry in 1999, and in 2000 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Costume Designers Guild of Hollywood.

Anthony Powell, born June 2 1935, died April 18 2021