The production designer and art director Norman Reynolds, who has died aged 89, concealed a career in Hollywood blockbusters by telling people he made biscuits for a living. In fact, he played an integral role in bringing to fruition two of the most successful franchises in cinema history. As art director in a team that also included the production designer John Barry, his fellow art director Leslie Dilley and the set decorator Roger Christian, Reynolds helped create the Oscar-winning look of the original Star Wars (1977), which was simultaneously spectacular and lived-in. The impression it gave was of a future that had seen better days.
Hired just before Christmas 1975, Reynolds started work only tentatively until the studio gave the green light to this risky project a few months later. Like everyone involved in the movie, he was often asked whether he had any inkling that it was going to change cinema forever. “Most of us, if I’m brutally frank, were just glad to be working,” he said in 2016. “Nobody had any idea that it was going to be the success that it is.” The realisation began to dawn on him as he watched the director George Lucas shooting the robots C-3PO and R2-D2 as they trundled through the desert in Tunisia. “I thought, ‘This is special. This could be something extraordinary.’”
His services were retained for the first two Star Wars sequels, The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983). On the former picture, indisputably the most impressive of the series, his responsibilities included designing the vast freezing chamber, illuminated with bars of orange light and wreathed in smoke, where Han Solo, played by Harrison Ford, is put into suspended animation at the end of the film. Its director Irvin Kershner, who was initially flummoxed when presented with Reynolds’s bold, wall-less blueprints, called it “the best set in the movie”.
Also memorable was the putrid swamp planet of Dagobah, where Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) receives instruction in the mystical Force from the wizened, gnome-like, pint-sized guru Yoda (Frank Oz). For this dank set, Reynolds flooded the studio floor, planted large quantities of the climbing vine known as old-man’s beard, and had the dry ice machine working overtime.
In Lucas’s capacity as co-creator and executive producer of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), the first in the Indiana Jones series of adventures paying homage to Saturday morning cliffhanger serials, he recommended Reynolds to the film’s director Steven Spielberg. Among his designs was the priceless statue that causes so much trouble in the prologue—for this, Reynolds painted and modified a souvenir found at an airport gift shop in Mexico – as well as the oversized boulder which almost flattens Jones (Ford again), and the cobwebbed, dilapidated jungle temple through which it rolls at great speed.
“We were a bit short of preparation time, and everyone was running all the time,” he recalled. “We were all swept along. All that came out in the film somehow, it had a freshness to it.” Raiders brought him his second Oscar, as well as his only Bafta, both shared with Dilley and Michael D Ford.
Reynolds was born in London, and studied at art college. His path into films came unexpectedly via a job at a company making illuminated signs. Following a commission to supply signs for The Road to Hong Kong (1962), the sixth and final instalment in the Road to … series of capers starring Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour, he visited Shepperton Studios and was “gobsmacked” by the sets he encountered there. “I was totally hooked, and determined to get into the film industry.”
A year later, he landed a design job at Elstree working on the comedy Come Fly with Me (1963), which was shot largely on a plane inside the studio, with “big puffy clouds made of cotton wool” suspended all around. “I felt that I’d found what I wanted to do,” he said. He then worked for two years on the long-running television series The Saint, starring Roger Moore, before being hired for the James Bond film Thunderball (1965).
He did uncredited art design work on The Battle of Britain (1969) and was assistant art director on Phase IV (1974), Saul Bass’s science-fiction horror film about killer ants. After the success of Star Wars, Reynolds was appointed art director on two further blockbusters, Superman The Movie (1978) and Superman II (1981), and production designer on the disturbing, inventive Wizard of Oz sequel Return to Oz (1985), an undeserved box-office flop.
As executive producer, Spielberg brought him on board for Young Sherlock Holmes (also 1985), directed by Barry Levinson, for which Reynolds built a version of late-19th-century London at Elstree studios, including a frozen replica of parts of the Thames; he also found locations at Eton college, Belvoir Castle in Grantham and Radley college, Oxford. He worked with Spielberg again on the director’s adaptation of JG Ballard’s autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun (1987), set in China during and immediately after the second world war.
Later films included David Fincher’s debut, Alien 3 (1992), with its striking mix of the industrialised and the medieval, and Brian De Palma’s high-tech, big-screen reboot of Mission: Impossible (1996) with Tom Cruise.
Reynolds’s final screen credit was for Bicentennial Man (1999), which starred Robin Williams as a robot who develops human emotions. It was not his most satisfying experience, since he felt that the director Chris Columbus concentrated most of his own energies on the performers and little on the visual elements – a bitter pill to swallow for a man who once called the set “the unspeaking actor”.
He is survived by his wife, Ann, and their three children.
• Norman Reynolds, production designer, born 26 March 1934; died 6 April 2023
• This article was amended on 10 April 2023 to correct a picture caption - the image of Norman Reynolds also shows Leslie Dilley, rather than Michael D Ford, as an earlier version stated.
