Gwen Wakeling

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Gwen Wakeling (born March 3, 1901 in Detroit , † June 16, 1982 in Los Angeles ; actually Gwen Sewell ) was an American costume designer for films.

Life

Costume of Basil Rathbone in the film The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939)

Gwen Wakeling was born in Detroit in 1901 as the daughter of a mining engineer . Her father's job made her move frequently with her family, attending schools in Seattle , San Francisco , Prescott , Los Angeles , Berkeley, and Oakland . After graduating from high school, she first worked as a fashion designer in a department store. She later studied for four years with Maurice LeLoir, the curator of a museum for historical costumes in Paris . She was finally discovered by director Cecil B. DeMille in the late 1920s . DeMille then hired her as a costume designer for his films while he was still working for the Pathé studios, and took her with him when he switched to Paramount Pictures . In 1933 she was signed by Fox Film Corporation , the studio that merged with 20th Century Pictures to form 20th Century Fox in 1935 . There she was chief designer until 1942.

During the 1930s she created the costumes of child star Shirley Temple , such as for John Ford's adventure film Recruit Willie Winkie ( Wee Willie Winkie , 1937). She has designed glamorous robes three times for film icon Rita Hayworth , for example for The Queen of Broadway ( My Gal Sal , 1942), Six Fates ( Tales of Manhattan , 1942) and The Goddess Dances ( Cover Girl , 1944). But she preferred to dress Loretta Young , as in the biopic The Rothschilds ( The House of Rothschild , 1934). In 1942 Wakeling left 20th Century Fox for health reasons due to appendicitis , married the director and screenwriter Henry J. Staudigl and worked as a freelance costume designer for studios such as Columbia Pictures , United Artists , Republic Pictures, Warner Bros. and RKO Pictures .

In 1951, together with Edith Head , Dorothy Jeakins , Eloise Jensson, and Gile Steele, she won an Oscar in the Best Costume Design category for DeMille's epic Samson and Delilah ( Samson and Delilah ). In the course of her career she has worked on more than 140 film productions. She also worked several times for director John Ford, such as As for Drums Along the Mohawk ( Drums Along the Mohawk , 1939), The Grapes of Wrath ( The Grapes of Wrath , 1940) and Green Was My Valley ( How Green Was My Valley , 1941). Wakeling, a founding member of the Costume Designers Guild, also designed costumes for numerous theater productions for the Civic Light Opera in Los Angeles in the 1960s. She died in Los Angeles in 1982 at the age of 81 .

Filmography (selection)

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Margaret J. Bailey: Those Glorious Glamor Years . Citadel Press, 1982, p. 384.