Margaret Furse

Alice Margaret Furse , born as Alice Margaret Watts (* February 18, 1911 in London ; † November 8, 1974 ) was a British costume designer who not only won the Oscar for best costume design , but also the British Academy Film Award and an Emmy received for the best costumes.

Life

Alice Margaret Watts was born to Arthur G. Watts, a well-known illustrator for Punch magazine . She trained at the Central School of Art in her hometown of London and joined other young artists in the 1930s to form the Motley group, of which she was a member for four years. She then moved to the designing company 'New Sheridan House'.

Her first marriage was the costume and production designer and later Oscar winner Roger K. Furse , through whom she first came into contact with the theater . After working as a costume designer alongside her husband at the theater, she began to work as a costume designer in film due to her good contacts with Laurence Olivier towards the end of the Second World War and was at the after the film adaptation of William Shakespeare's Heinrich V (1944) made by Oliver Equipment of around 40 films involved.

Even after her divorce from Furse and marriage to film consultant Stephen Watts, she kept Furse's last name.

At the Academy Awards in 1952 , she and Edward Stevenson were nominated for the first time for the Oscar for best costume design for the black and white film The Dirty Sparrow and the Queen (1950). For the costumes in the color film Becket (1964), she not only received another Oscar nomination in 1965 , but also won the British Film Academy Award for Best Costumes . In 1966 she was nominated for the British Film Award for Best Costumes for two color films: one for Cassidy the Rebel (1965) and the other for A Shot in the Dark (1964). For the costumes in The Lion in Winter (1968) she received another Oscar and another nomination for the British Film Prize in 1969 .

At the Academy Awards in 1970 she finally won the Oscar for Best Costume Design in Queen for a Thousand Days and was also nominated for another British Film Award in 1971.

This was followed by two more Oscar nominations for the best costumes: one in 1971 for Scrooge (1970) and the other in 1972 for Maria Stuart, Queen of Scotland (1971).

She most recently received an Emmy posthumously in 1975 for costume design in the television film Love in the Twilight (1975).

Margaret Furse, who also designed the costumes for Oliver Twist (1948), has worked with film directors such as George Cukor , Peter Glenville , Jack Cardiff , Blake Edwards , Anthony Harvey , Charles Jarrott , Jean Negulesco and Ronald Neame throughout her career .

The portrait she painted by Roger Furse is part of the permanent exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London . Margaret Furse, who died of breast cancer , was also the sister-in-law of the film actresses Judith and Jill Furse , Roger Furse's two younger sisters.

Web links

• Margaret Furse in the Internet Movie Database (English)

literature

• Kay Less : The film's great personal dictionary . The actors, directors, cameramen, producers, composers, screenwriters, film architects, outfitters, costume designers, editors, sound engineers, make-up artists and special effects designers of the 20th century. Volume 3: F - H. Barry Fitzgerald - Ernst Hofbauer. Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-89602-340-3 , p. 149.