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.’”
