The art director Carmen Dillon, who died on April 12th, aged 91, was fortunate to have gained her experience in the 1940s and early 1950s, when most films were shot in a studio and when British cinema made some attempt to equal Hollywood in spectacle.
In 1948, in recognition of her design of Laurence Olivier's Hamlet, she became the first woman ever to win an Oscar for set decoration, an award that had been called "interior decoration" until the previous year.
Carmen Dillon was also one of the very few woman art directors and designers around until the 1960s, when more and more entered the field. Like many of the best art directors, her work often determined the mood and atmosphere of a film, as well as the visual quality.
Although Roger Furse was credited with the art direction on Hamlet, it was mainly she who realised the predominantly sombre sets - the sinuous, maze-like corridors and misty-edged brutal battlements of Elsinore. She always felt that her architectural background was a prerequisite of her success.
Of Irish origin, Carmen Dillon was born in Cricklewood, northwest London, the youngest of six children. One of her sisters, Una, founded the Dillon's bookshops. Her interest in the cinema was aroused when she met several art directors, including Vincent Korda and Alfred Junge, while studying in London at the Architectural Association. She liked, what she called, "the arty side" of films.
She began in the industry working on "rotten little old films, but very exciting and great fun to do - with as little as £100 spent on sets."
One of her first big jobs was as assistant to Ralph Brinton on The Mikado (1938), the first film made at Pinewood in Technicolor.
Later she worked as assistant art director on a number of Anthony Asquith films, including French Without Tears (1939) and Quiet Wedding (1940), eventually becoming the art director on Asquith's The Demi-Paradise (1943).
A year later, she and Paul Sheriff were experimenting with flattened perspectives, painted backdrops derived from medieval paintings, and stylised landscapes for Olivier's Henry V, effectively contrasting them with location shooting. She worked with Olivier again on Hamlet, Richard III (1955) and The Prince and the Showgirl (1957). Further films under Asquith's direction were The Browning Version (1951) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1952), for which she created an elegant and witty Edwardian style.
As the quality of British films deteriorated in the mid-1950s, and more and more movies were shot on location, the challenges for an art director like Carmen Dillon, whose preference was for period pieces and studio design, were diminished.
She designed a few of the Doctor comedy films, and a couple of the Carry On series, as well as a number of other run-of-the-mill British comedies, until rescued artistically by Joseph Losey, who employed her on Accident (1967) and The Go-Between (1971).
Carmen Dillon, who never married - believing that her work was a "wholetime" job - lived for many years with her two unmarried sisters in a large Edwardian flat off Kensington High Street, west London. She spent the last decade of her life in a nursing home, having outlived her siblings.
Carmen Dillon: born 1908; died April, 2000