Name Julie Harris | Books Gypsy | |
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Nominations BAFTA Award for Best Costume Design, BAFTA Award for Best British Costume Design (Black and White) Similar People Gilbert Taylor, John Schlesinger, Bryan Forbes, Syd Cain, Richard Lester | ||
Julie harris at the cinema museum london 2010
Julie Harris (26 March 1921 – 30 May 2015) was a British costume designer. She won the Academy Award for Best Costume Design in 1965, and worked on a number of Beatles and James Bond films.
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Career
Born in London in 1921, Harris began her career in 1947 at Gainsborough Pictures with Holiday Camp, the forerunner of the Huggett family film series. During her early career she was mentored by Elizabeth Haffenden, and went on to work for the Rank Organisation until that studio wound down its business in the 1950s.
Over the next 30 years, she worked with actors such as Jayne Mansfield, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Lauren Bacall and Alan Ladd and directors Alfred Hitchcock, Joseph Losey, Billy Wilder and John Schlesinger. She made a "mink bikini" (actually made out of rabbit fur) for Diana Dors. She worked steadily on feature films throughout the next three decades, hitting her stride in the 1960s, before shifting her attention to television movies until her retirement in 1991.
Harris won the Oscar for Best Costume Design for Darling in 1965, and the BAFTA Award for Best Costume Design for The Wrong Box in 1967. She also worked on the Beatles' first two live action feature films, A Hard Day's Night (1964), and Help! (1965), quipping that "I must be one of the few people who can claim they have seen John, Paul, George and Ringo naked." She also worked on the James Bond films Live and Let Die and Rollerball with Roger Moore, and the spoof Casino Royale with David Niven Harris also designed costumes for the Carry On film Carry On Cleo (1964), a sword and sandal spoof set in ancient Rome and Egypt, described as "perhaps the best" of the series.
Harris died after a brief illness from a chest infection, aged 94 on 30 May 2015.