Dorothy Jeakins

Encyclopedia : D : DO : DOR : Dorothy Jeakins

Dorothy Jeakins (1914 - 1995) was a three-time Academy Award-winning costume designer. She got her start working on WPA projects and as a Disney artist in the 1930s. Her fashion career began as a designer at I. Magnin's, where she was spotted by director Victor Fleming. Hired as a sketch artist for Joan of Arc (1948), Jeakins soon replaced costume designer Karinska and won an Oscar, in the first year that one was awarded for costume design, for her medieval designs.

Jeakins was unusual in that she freelanced, never signing a long-term contract with any one studio. She worked steadily for the next fifty years, winning another two Oscars, for Samson and Delilah (1949, shared with Edith Head and others), and Night of the Iguana (1964), and another 12 nominations. She was perhaps best-known for her period costumes, in such films as The Ten Commandments (1956), The Music Man (1962), The Sound of Music (1965), Little Big Man (1970), The Way We Were (1973), Young Frankenstein (1974) and The Dead (1987). Her modern-dress excursions included Niagara (1953), Three Coins in the Fountain (1954), South Pacific (1958) and On Golden Pond (1981).

Jeakins also worked on stage productions, including South Pacific, King Lear, Winesburg, Ohio and The World of Suzie Wong (for which she received her third Tony nomination), and such television productions as Annie Get Your Gun and Mayerling. For ten years beginning in 1953, she served as designer for the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera Company, and was curator of that city's textile and costume collection at the County Museum of Art. Jeakins, who retired in 1990, once summed up her designing: "I can put my world down to two words: Make beauty. It's my cue and my private passion."

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.