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Please join us in remembering her, with these words from The Hollywood Reporter.
Yvonne Blake, designer of the iconic costumes for the 1978 box-office hit Superman, has died. She was 78.
She shared an Academy Award with Antonio Castillo for the three-hour-plus 1971 costume drama Nicholas and Alexandra, directed by Franklin J. Schaffner. “I suppose all one can say is that if it wasn’t for the Russian Revolution, I wouldn’t be here,” Blake said when accepting her award.
In a presentation to the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in 2013, Blake spoke about the difficulties in designing the iconic [Superman] costume. “I started prepping long before there was a director or an actor,” she said. “I worked solely with the production designer, director of photography and the special effects director. These were then innovators on special effects on a grand scale. Now it seems very familiar, but in those days, pre-digital, we were like Christopher Columbus discovering the New World. A voyage into unknown territory. ”
Her work could also be seen in Norman Jewison’s Jesus Christ Superstar (1973); Robin and Marian(1976), starring Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn; the 1976 war film The Eagle Has Landed, and Milos Forman’s Goya’s Ghost (2006).
Said current Spanish Film Academy president Mariano Barroso in a statement: “I met Yvonne when she called me to accompany her in the presidency of the institution. I witnessed her enormous generosity, her passion and her dedication, and at her age, she chose to work for all of us. She took the Academy in difficult times, and her work has been decisive for the new stage of modernization that we are experiencing.”