Terence Marsh once said of his work designing film sets: “If you can see what I’ve done, I haven’t done it well enough.” He reconstructed revolutionary Russia for Doctor Zhivago (1965) and captured the poverty of 19th- century London for the musical Oliver! (1968), sharing Academy Awards for both with John Box, the production designer.
Doctor Zhivago was two years in the making. “We were looking for locations and we settled on Spain,” Marsh said in 2011, adding that the country had the infrastructure to supply hundreds of extras and horses. The interiors were shot at a studio, but Marsh drove around the countryside to find suitable locations for outdoor shots. Eventually he came across a large parcel of land. “A developer wanted to build a group of houses,” Marsh recalled. “He had put the roads in, but hadn’t yet got around to building the homes. We did a deal.”
By contrast Oliver!, which was filmed at Pinewood Studios, seemed simpler — it only required 350 men laying about 10,000 cobblestones.
The design of a film was never planned in advance, he explained, but would evolve over time. Yet he was invariably astonished by how much critics read into a movie. “I’ve spoken to several directors who’ve said, ‘Did you read what this critic said? By cutting to this I was subliminally saying this, that and the other. That thought never entered my head, but it’s good. It sounds like I’m terribly clever.’ ”
Marsh was also nominated for Oscars for his work on Scrooge (1970), starring Albert Finney, and Mary, Queen of Scots (1971), with Vanessa Redgrave and Glenda Jackson.
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For the ventriloquist’s dummy in Magic (1978), starring Anthony Hopkins, he modelled the puppet on the actor’s face, but as the character slips deeper into insanity he painted the eyes increasingly redder, “so it became more and more sinister”.
His work creating the imaginary prisons of The Shawshank Redemption (1994), which were built in a disused electricity plant in Ohio, and The Green Mile (1999), with “old sparky”, the decrepit and harrowing electric chair, did much to popularise those films. Frank Darabont, who directed them, said that without Marsh “there would have been no Shawshank to redeem, no mile to walk”.
Terence George Thomas Marsh was born in London in 1931 and from an early age loved drawing, painting and watching films. His father, George Marsh, was a typesetter for a newspaper who had been a lifeguard and champion Charleston dancer, a talent he passed on to his son. His Irish-born mother, Sheila (née Mullen), worked as a film stand-in for Dulcie Gray and Patricia Roc. According to family folklore, Sheila’s finest hour was when she appeared on screen with Tyrone Power uttering the immortal line: “Goodbye, darling.” It was from her that young Terence inherited his striking blond looks and unwavering enthusiasm for the silver screen.
As a child he helped to supplement the family income by sitting as a model for knitting patterns. He then studied architectural drawing at Willesden College of Technology, did National Service as a signal engineer in the RAF and trained as a draughtsman for six years at Rank Films at Pinewood Studios, working uncredited on films that included A Town Like Alice (1956).
John Box, who was the production designer on David Lean’s epic Lawrence of Arabia (1962), picked Marsh to be assistant art director. At one stage he was called on to double for Peter O’Toole, who did not fancy his chances on a Brough Superior motorcycle. Marsh remembered Lean as being “always polite”, adding: “He was a technician rather than a warm person. He didn’t feel comfortable with actors.”
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When asked many years later what his main task had been on this, his first “big” film, Marsh replied, with characteristic modesty: “Oh, I built Aqaba.”
Sometimes he worked on big-budget spectacles, but on other occasions he had to improvise, such as with The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’s Smarter Brother (1975), Gene Wilder’s directorial debut in which Marsh recreated Victorian London at Shepperton Studios on a minimal budget. “We had one scene in a hansom cab with Gene and another hansom cab draws up alongside and they are trying to murder Gene,” Marsh said. “He climbs on the roof of the cab and they have a fight on top of the cabs with whips. Thank God, we had a production designer’s two favourite things going for us — night and fog . . . we got a marvellous-looking film.”
He enjoyed working with friends such as Mel Brooks, putting in a cameo appearance as the Drum Beater in Brooks’s hit comedy Space Balls (1987), and Wilder, with whom he co-wrote Haunted Honeymoon (1986), which was not a success. Wilder once said that meeting Marsh was like finding his “long-lost brother”, adding: “I loved the English accent, of course, but the simple way he described complicated things, and the humour with which he described them, won me.”
In 1951 Marsh married Lorna Wrapson, whom he had met at art school, but the union was dissolved in 1975. In the same year he moved to Los Angeles and married Sandra Rogers, whom he had met on a film set four years earlier. Wilder was among the wedding guests.
Rogers was later Vanessa Redgrave’s agent. The couple lived in a 1920s Spanish-style house in Pacific Palisades, next door to John Barrymore’s former mansion, with a splendid view over the sea. His wife survives him with three daughters from his first marriage: Gina, who is a film and TV producer; Rebecca, who is an artist and therapist; and Joss, who is the curator of the New Kent Museum of the Moving Image in Deal, Kent. His eldest daughter, Linda, a hotelier and restaurateur, died in 2015.
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Marsh, who was an outstanding trumpet player and a big fan of Louis Armstrong, retired in 2001 after completing work on Rush Hour 2 directed by Brett Ratner, noting how the approach to film-making had changed since Lean’s time. “It was joining a lot of jolly school boys having fun,” he said, disapprovingly. “They wrote the script as we went along, which was not good for the art department.”
His other notable films included Richard Attenborough’s A Bridge Too Far (1977) — he had to create hundreds of Second World War gliders without any plans of the original aircraft from which to work — and John McTiernan’s The Hunt for Red October (1990), which involved riding out in a Trident-class nuclear submarine to understand how to create a suitably claustrophobic set.
In 2010 he was awarded a lifetime achievement award from the Art Directors’ Guild. Asked to reminisce about his years in the industry, he said: “I miss the camaraderie of the art department. But I don’t miss the wrangles over the budget.”
Terence Marsh, production designer, was born on November 14, 1931. He died from cancer on January 9, 2018, aged 86