NEW YORK, NY.- Anthea Sylbert, an Oscar-nominated costume designer of the films “Chinatown” and “Julia,” who left Hollywood fitting rooms to be a studio executive and, later, Goldie Hawn’s producing partner, died June 18 at her home on the Greek island of Skiathos. She was 84.
Robert Romanus, her stepson, said the cause was complications of emphysema.
Sylbert began designing costumes for films in 1967. Over the next decade, she collaborated with A-list directors like Mike Nichols, Roman Polanski and Elaine May and conceived what Jack Nicholson wore when he starred in “Chinatown,” “The Fortune” and “Carnal Knowledge.”
“Jack Nicholson actually gave me the best compliment I ever got as a costume designer,” she said in “My Life in 3 Acts,” a forthcoming documentary about Sylbert directed by Sakis Lalas. “He said, ‘When ‘The Ant’ does your clothes, you don’t have to act as much.’” (“The Ant” was short for Anthea, she explained.)
Sylbert envisioned Jake Gittes, the natty, determined private detective played by Nicholson in “Chinatown” (1974), as a dandy.
“I thought he would be interested in fashion,” she told Sam Wasson for his book “The Big Goodbye: ‘Chinatown’ and the Last Years of Hollywood” (2020). “The one who would be noticing what the stars were wearing when he went to the races.”
Deborah Nadoolman Landis, chair of the David C. Copley Center for the Study of Costume Design at the School of Theater, Film and Television at the University of California, Los Angeles, recalled a vivid scene in “Chinatown” in which Gittes and Evelyn Mulwray, played by Faye Dunaway, sit together in a red restaurant banquette.
Dunaway wears a black hat with a black veil, a black suit and white pearls, “and the only other thing in the frame are her brilliant red lips,” Landis said in an interview. She added: “This frame reduces every element to white, red and black. It’s pure, symmetrical and unreal.”
Landis described Sylbert as a powerhouse with an outsize personality.
“In my mind,” she said, “she was a 5-foot-tall woman, but once she walks into a room, she’s 7 feet tall.”
While working on “Shampoo” (1975), about a promiscuous hair stylist (Warren Beatty) and his various affairs, Sylbert was confronted one day in a fitting room by Julie Christie, who portrayed a former lover. She asked Sylbert to make a lower cut to the front of a black evening dress that had a high-neck cut.
“I said, ‘No, not this dress,’” she recalled telling Christie in “My Life in 3 Acts.” “‘I’ll design a whole other dress, but this dress is this dress.’ The joke is that she’s up to here until she turns around and you see the crack in her ass.”
Anthea Giannakouros was born Oct. 6, 1939, in the New York City borough of Brooklyn to Nicholas and Georgia (Scourbys) Giannakouros. After graduating from Barnard College in 1959 with a bachelor’s degree in art history, she left graduate school to pursue costume design.
“It occurred to me that this might be more interesting than 12th-century manuscripts,” she told Variety in 2005. She worked as a researcher for a costume designer and then designed costumes for off-Broadway plays and shoes for Capezio.
She married production designer Paul Sylbert in 1965 and worked with him on her first film, “The Tiger Makes Out” (1967), starring Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson. Sylbert told Variety that she was hired “because none of the successful Broadway designers would deign to do such a small film.”
Sylbert’s twin brother, Richard, also a production designer, introduced the couple to Polanski. She and Richard Sylbert worked on “Rosemary’s Baby,” Polanski’s 1968 horror film about a pregnant woman (Mia Farrow) sold out by her husband (John Cassavettes) to a coven of satanists.
“Roman said to me, ‘Let’s make ’em think we’re doing a Doris Day movie,’” she was quoted as saying in “Designing Movies: Portrait of a Hollywood Artist” (2006), a book that Richard Sylbert wrote, with Sylvia Townsend, about his career. “He wanted everything to look ordinary.”
Farrow’s wardrobe was deliberately bland.
Over the next decade, Sylbert designed the costumes for “Carnal Knowledge” and “The Day of the Dolphin,” for Nichols; “A New Leaf” and “The Heartbreak Kid,” for May; and “The Last Tycoon,” for Elia Kazan.
In 1975, Sylbert lost her Oscar bid for “Chinatown” to Theoni Aldredge, who won for “The Great Gatsby.” Sylbert was nominated again in 1978 for “Julia,” the story of the friendship between the writer Lillian Hellman and her childhood friend, an anti-Nazi activist, but John Mollo won for “Star Wars.”
In 1977, she abruptly changed careers. “At the very point where I thought, ‘I can’t do this anymore,’ I got a call from Warner Bros.,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1987.
She joined the studio as a vice president — she was one of the few women in Hollywood’s executive ranks — and in 1980 moved to United Artists, where she rose to senior vice president of production. She left in 1982 amid turmoil at the studio.
She returned briefly to costume design, this time for the theater, when Nichols, a close friend, asked her to work on his production of Tom Stoppard’s play “The Real Thing,” which opened on Broadway in early 1984. She received a Tony Award nomination. Her only other work on Broadway was on Neil Simon’s “The Prisoner of Second Avenue” in 1972.
In his review in The New York Times, Frank Rich praised Sylbert’s designs, noting that her “delicate, ever-changing costume modulations enhance the illusion of cinematic speed and style.”
By then, she had already begun her partnership with Hawn, at a time when the idea of women making films that appealed to women was still unusual in Hollywood.
“We weren’t afraid,” Hawn said. “She didn’t have any fear at all. She fought for what she believed in and made everyone around her better.”
Over the next decade, the films made by the Hawn/Sylbert Movie Co. included “Protocol,” “Overboard,” “Swing Shift” and “Wildcats,” all of which starred Hawn, as well as “Something to Talk About,” with Julia Roberts, and “My Blue Heaven,” with Steve Martin.
After their partnership ended amicably, Sylbert was an executive producer of “Truman” (1995), starring Gary Sinise as the former president, for which she shared an Emmy Award for outstanding television movie with Paula Weinstein and Doro Bachrach.
Romanus, her stepson, is her only immediate survivor. Her marriage to Sylbert ended in divorce.
Her second husband, actor Richard Romanus, with whom she wrote the scripts for two films that aired on the Lifetime network in the late 1990s, died in December. The couple moved to Skiathos in 2002.
Hawn and her partner, Kurt Russell, regularly visited Sylbert and Romanus in Skiathos, most recently in Sylbert’s final days. Hawn said that she and Sylbert sprayed their favorite perfume over each other and drank cognac.
“I laid beside her,” she said. “Pet her head, kissed her face. She passed away in between kisses.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
