http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/12/05/db0503.xmlMarit Allen
Last Updated: 2:20am GMT 05/12/2007
Marit Allen, who has died aged 66, was the costume designer on more than 40 films over 25 years after enjoying a successful career as a fashion journalist.
Allen: proper film maker who realised who the character was and where they lived
Born in Cheshire on September 17 1941, Marit Allen was the elder of two daughters of Roger Allen, landlord of an hotel at Lymm.
She inherited her Christian name, her hair colour, and her love of craft and design from her Norwegian mother, an exotic, flame-haired beauty who had lit up this rural backwater in the straitened 1940s and 1950s.
At the age of nine Marit was sent off to a prim and proper girls' boarding school; it is not recorded what the staff or pupils made of the red woollen stockings, emerald green skirt and scarlet jacket in which she was clothed on her arrival.
Her sense of colour and style, implanted at an early age, marked her out then, and throughout her career. The school is also reputed to have given her the inspiration for her costumes for Mrs Doubtfire, the Robin Williams cross-dressing comedy based on the Anne Fine novel, which she was to design in 1993.
After studying at the University of Grenoble, Marit returned to London in 1960, just as the worlds of fashion, art, music and journalism were emerging from postwar austerity into the era that came to be known as the Swinging Sixties. Marit was to be at the core of this period, which has since been endlessly dissected.
It is said that she was first discovered working as a lift girl in Jaeger, and by 1961 she had persuaded Queen magazine, then in its heyday under the editorship of Beatrix Miller and the ownership of Jocelyn Stevens, to take her on as a journalist.
Reflecting the new interest and enthusiasm for youth that were evident everywhere she created the "About Twenty" pages with Caterine Milinaire. This was unlike anything previously published in Queen.
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Three years later she followed Beatrix Miller to Vogue, at the time when a youthful David Bailey was forging his personal and professional partnership with another 1960s icon, Jean Shrimpton.
At Vogue Marit Allen initiated the "Young Idea" pages and took credit for promoting the careers of people such as Sally Tuffin and Marion Foale, Zandra Rhodes, Mary Quant and John Bates.
She captivated Norman Parkinson and Bailey, who then included her in their pictures - a "first" for any fashion editor.
Even the older members of the fashion elite were caught up in her energy and enthusiasm: Cecil Beaton's memorable image of Twiggy on a mantelpiece was the result of Marit Allen's imagination and persuasive powers.
In 1965 her friend Doug Hayward, the bespoke tailor to the stars and the man said to be have inspired the character of "Alfie", invited a film producer friend to a birthday party. It was for Marit's 24th birthday, and a year later she and the producer, Sandy Lieberson, were married.
She gave up her career at Vogue when the first of her children arrived.
While she was pregnant Bailey took a picture of her which was to precede by several decades the infamous Annie Liebowitz image of Demi Moore for Vanity Fair. In Bailey's picture, which he published in his book Goodbye Baby and Amen, the nine-months-pregnant, naked Marit - tiny, porcelain-like and composed - stares out at the viewer, daring him to respond.
Through her husband Marit Allen was introduced to the world of film, and the possibilities excited her. Fashion, for all its thrills in the 1960s, was limited, but in film she could express her love of character and narrative.
Her first job was on Kaleidoscope, starring Warren Beatty and Susannah York. Kaleidoscope's producer, Elliot Kastner, said of her that "she seemed so smart and had such good taste".
Almost all those with whom she subsequently worked - directors, actors and producers - were to echo these sentiments.
In 1973 she started work on Nicholas Roeg's film with Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, Don't Look Now. This picture, set in Venice, was the first of three films she worked on with Roeg and he remembered her technique with considerable affection: "She made costumes that brought the characters to life."
According to Roeg, Donald Sutherland found his character only on the day when Marit Allen produced a large pair of woolly gloves; he put them on and never removed them for the duration of the shoot.
Marit Allen understood that the key to being an outstanding costume designer in films was not to push oneself, nor ever to be showy or ostentatious. She instinctively understood the observation that "Clothes make a statement. Costumes tell a story."
For her, character and narrative were everything. She read the script of every film on which she worked, searching for the key to the characters, imagining what they would wear at any given time in the course of the narrative arc. As Roeg put it: "She realised who the character was, where they lived, what world they inhabited. She was a proper film maker."
Perhaps it was because she shunned ostentation in her design, always putting the needs of the film before her own reputation, that she was overlooked by the grandees who vote for awards, although she was nominated for a Bafta (for her costumes in White Mischief) and two Emmys.
This year her designs for two films - the Edith Piaf biopic La Vie en Rose and Mike Newell's adaptation of the Gabriel García Márquez novel Love in the Time of Cholera - have been tipped for Oscar nomination.
Marit Allen was the only costume designer to have worked on more than one of Ang Lee's films. She worked with him on Ride with the Devil, Hulk and, in 2005, Brokeback Mountain.
For Brokeback Mountain she, Lee and the cinematographer, Rodrigo Preito, studied Richard Avedon's book Photographs of the American West.
Marit Allen said: "Heath (Ledger) was deeply involved with his character. He worked with his clothes, using everything he wears to convey Ennis' repression - the jackets, done up; the cowboy hats, to hide behind. Between him and Jake (Gyllenhaal) the hats became an integral part of what they were doing."
The colleagues with whom she worked in her costume departments recall her generosity, her passion and her good humour, qualities which survived even the trial of working with Stanley Kubrick. She provided the costume design for his last film, Eyes Wide Shut.
In October she had started work in Australia with the director George Miller on a new film, Justice League of America. When she failed to arrive at work one morning her colleagues went to her hotel room, where they found that she had suffered a brain haemorrhage.
Some days later, on November 26, she died in hospital having never regained consciousness.
Marit Allen's marriage to Sandy Lieberson was dissolved in 1983. She is survived by two daughters and a son.
