Up for a fourth Oscar thanks to Mrs Harris Goes to Paris, Jenny Beavan talks about her bohemian childhood, her early work with Merchant Ivory and how she deals with difficult actors
, a charming film about Ada Harris , a cleaner who falls in love with a Christian Dior gown belonging to a client and sets her heart on getting her own. It is set in the 50s and the clothes are, of course, wonderful – you have to believe that a dress could be so exquisite, and made with such haute couture artistry, that Ada becomes obsessed with it – but even the floral tabards she wears while she’s cleaning are a thing of beauty.
Beavan is in her early 70s now, and although she has enjoyed not working for the past few months, she is thinking about her next projects. “I’m not sure what I’d do every day if I didn’t work.” She grew up in London, where her mother and father were professional musicians – her father a cellist and her mother a viola player. Both had come from unconventional families.
When Beavan was about 10, her grandfather took her to see Twelfth Night. “I just fell in love,” she says. “I didn’t know about all the backstage stuff at that point, I wasn’t certain I wanted to act, I just wanted to be part of that magical world.” She went to the Central School of Art and Design, learning from the theatre designer Ralph Koltai.
She worked for the Royal Opera House, and others, “anyone who would have me”. In the 70s, a childhood friend, by now working in TV and commissioning a Merchant Ivory film, brought Beavan in to do the costumes. She had no plans to go into costume design full-time, but Merchant Ivory kept calling and she found she enjoyed it. Set-designer friends joke with her, “and say, ‘At least a chest of drawers doesn’t answer you back’. But I like the interaction with a real person.
It was “really tricky times”, she says, to be a young woman working in film in the 80s and 90s. “It was the days of the unions when it was like a mafia, and particularly in wardrobe, there were a lot of men. They didn’t like young female designers, and I wasn’t allowed to be called a designer because I wasn’t in whatever union, so I had an absolute loathing of unions because they made my life really difficult. Completely different now, and I think the unions are more useful.
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