Edith Head passed away 43 years ago today. So I thought I would highlight the career and attachments of this remarkable person.
Edith Head (née Posenor) was born on the 28th of October 1897 in San Bernardino, California.
She went on to be an American costume designer working in the motion picture industry.
In 1919 when Edith was 21 she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in letters and sciences with honors in French from the University of California, Berkeley, and in 1920 earned a Master of Arts degree in romance languages from Stanford University.
She started her professional career working as a language teacher at The Bishop's School in La Jolla, San Diego, California teaching French.
After one year, she took a position teaching Spanish at the Hollywood School for Girls. Wanting to increase her salary, she told the school that she could also teach art.
Even though she had only briefly studied art while she was a pupil at highschool. She fully embraced the fake it till you make it ethos.
To help her with this new role she enrolled in evening classes at the Otis Art Institute and the Chouinard Art College to improve her drawing skills that at the time could have been described as rudimentary.
While she was attending Chouinard Art College she met the brother of one of her classmates Charles Head and the pair went on to marry on the 25th of July 1923.
So the young Edith Posenor takes her husband's surname Head which is the name she will be known by for rest of her life even though the marriage ended in divorce 13 years later in 1936 and Edith re-married in 1940 to Hollywood set designer Wiard Ihnen.
In 1924 when the school was on summer break she decided to apply for a position at the Famous Players Lasky Studios (which went on to become Paramount Studios) as a sketch artist in the costume department.
Edith later confessed to constructing her portfolio for the interview with drawings that were not her own. Again faking it till she made it.
“I didn’t steal them, I asked everybody in the class for a few costume design sketches. And I had the most fantastic assortment you’ve ever seen in your life…It never occurred to me that it was quite dishonest. And all the students thought that it was fun, too, just like a dare to see if I could get the job. I didn’t say the work was mine, I said, ‘This is the sort of thing we do in our school.“
Edith did get the job and started designing costumes for motion pictures.
Her first film was "The Wanderer" (1925) which was directed by Raoul Walsh.
The film starred Greta Nissen seen here in one of Edith's creations.
over the next five years Edith established herself as one of the leading costume designers working in Hollywood.
She worked at Paramount Pictures for 43 years where she was responsible for the costume design in approximately 380 films!
Cinematic highlights from her time at Paramount Pictures include,
The Lady Eve (1941)
Sullivan's Travels (1941)
The Uninvited (1944)
Double Indemnity (1944)
The Lost Weekend (1945)
The Bells of St. Mary's (1945)
Notorious (1946)
Sunset Boulevard (1950)
All About Eve (1950)
A place in the Sun (1951)
Ace in the Hole (1951)
When Worlds Collide (1951)
War of the Worlds (1953)
Shane (1953)
Roman Holiday (1953)
Rear Window (1954)
White Christmas (1954)
To Catch a Thief (1955)
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)
The Ten Commandments (1956)
Funny Face (1957)
Witness for the Prosecution (1957)
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957)
Vertigo (1958)
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
The Birds (1963)
Hud (1963)
Over the time she was with Paramount Pictures she worked with some of the greatest film directors of all time, Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, William Wyler, Cecil B. DeMille, John Sturges & John Ford. While working on these films Edith was designing costumes for performers who themselves became visually iconic looking the way Edith wanted them to look...
Think about Audry Hepburn on a Vespa wearing that quintessential 50's outfit.
A fantastic example of Edith's work is the spectacular cochure fashion that was designed and made for Grace Kelly in the 1954 Alfred Hitchcock film Rear Window
I am not an expert on fashion of any kind of clothing but I can't help but think the line between what was coming out of fashion houses in the mid 50's, what people were seeing and desiring and what was coming out of Edith Head's imagination onto her sketchbook and onto the silver screen is blurred. Was she channelling trends or creating them?
Also during her time with Paramount she also designed the costumes for about eight Elvis movies including.
She also worked on those Bob Hope & Bing Crosby road movies and the Jerry Lewis comedies, Just trying to highlight that you have probably seen her work...
At the age of 70 Edith left Paramount Pictures and went to Universal Pictures signing her contract on the 27th of March 1967 where she worked for the rest of her life.
In the late 60's Hollywood was rapidly changing from what it had been during Head's heyday in the 30s,40s and 50s. The "New Hollywood" movement saw film production moving to outdoor and location shooting away from the traditional studio system and many of the actresses she regularly worked with and knew intimately retired or were working a lot less.
But saying that Edith did work on some insanely legendary films such as...
Sweet Charity (1969)
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972)
The Sting (1973)
Now under contract to Universal she could turn her hand to designing costumes for Television productions where many of the performers she knew were now working.
She designed all of Endora's iconic outfits on Bewitched,
Edith's talent did not go unrecognised! She was nominated 35 times at The Oscars and won 8.
The Heiress (1949)
All About Eve (1950)
Samson and Delilah (1950)
A Place in the Sun (1951)
Roman Holiday (1953)
Sabrina (1954)
The Facts of Life (1960)
The Sting (1973)
making her the most awarded woman in the Academy's history.
The year after she won the Oscar for "The Sting" she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame,
Her star is located at 6504 Hollywood Boulevard.
What I am getting at is Edith Head is a big deal in the history of Hollywood "Full Stop" removing her gender from the conversation.
Edith Head passed away on the 24th of October 1981, four days before her 84th birthday.
She died from myelofibrosis, an incurable bone marrow disease.
She is interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.
For someone who was a French/Spanish language teacher who blagged her way into a summer job she managed to reach the top of her chosen profession and managed to influence the aesthetic of popular culture for decades and for an individual working in the background of Hollywood has become a well known name. I am a big fan of movies and when I think of famous costume designers I can only think of a few Tony Walton who designed the costumes for Marry Poppins (1964), The Wiz (1978) & Murder on the Orient Express (1974) mainly because I have him filed in my head as Julie Andrews' husband and Deborah Nadoolman who has a costume designer was responsible for "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (1981), An American Werewolf in London (1981), Trading Places (1983) & Coming to America (1988) but again I think I only know her by name because she is the wife of the director John Landis.
With Edith Head I know her name and I know what she did in her own right and what she did was design costumes for some of the most successful and glamorous actors in Hollywood history.
Mae West, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Cary Grant, Barbara Stanwyck, Clark Gable, Clara Bow, James Stewart, Ingrid Bergman, Bette Davis, Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, Shirley MacLaine, Doris Day, Lauren Bacall, Elvis Presley, Marlene Dietrich, Rita Hayworth, Kim Novak, Natalie Wood, Jane Fonda, Rock Hudson, Robert Redford & Paul Newman to name a few!
Edith as herself does appear in pop culture,
She had a cameo appearance in an episode of Columbo: Requiem for a Falling Star (1973) she is designing a dress for a character and Her Oscars were displayed on a desk in the scene.
She has a cameo in the film "Lucy Gallant" (1955)
playing herself being an MC at a fashion show.
In 1999 the duo They Might Be Giants have a song on their album, Long Tall Weekend, entitled "(She Thinks She's) Edith Head."
As part of a series of stamps issued by the U.S. Postal Service in February 2003, commemorating the behind-the-camera personnel who make movies, Head was featured on a stamp honouring costume design.
The most high profile reference to Edith Head must be the visual appearance of Edna Mode, the costume designer in Pixar's The Incredibles and Incredibles 2.
The character was designed and voiced by the film's creator and director Brad Bird as a tribute to the late designer and her work in Hollywood.
