American costume designer (1897-1981). Birth name: Edith Claire Posener. Born in San Bernadino, California, Edith had graduated from college and was teaching school when she answered a classified ad seeking sketch artists in 1923. Though she'd primarily hoped to learn enough about art to enable her to teach a class on the subject, she was hired by Paramount Studios, eventually moving up to become the studio's head designer in 1937.
At Paramount, the small, bespectacled, and seemingly unglamourous Head had a tremendous influence on fashion, mainly because she was designing costumes for all of the studio's most important and most glamourous movies, including "All About Eve", "Sunset Boulevard", "A Place in the Sun", and hundreds of others. She worked on many of Alfred Hitchcock's films and even chose Grace Kelly's gold lamé gown she made for "To Catch a Thief" as her favorite design.
After moving to Universal in 1967, Head worked on "Sweet Charity", "Airport", "Rooster Cogburn", and others, and was loaned out to other studios to work on "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" and "The Man Who Would Be King".
By the time she died of bone marrow disease in 1981, Head had worked on almost 450 movies, from "The Legion of the Condemned" in 1928 to "Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid", which was released in 1982, after she died, and dedicated to her. She received 35 Oscar nominations and won Academy Awards for "The Heiress", "Samson and Delilah", "All About Eve", "A Place in the Sun", "Roman Holiday", "Sabrina", "The Facts of Life", and "The Sting", making her the most honored woman in Academy history. She also wrote several books on fashion and designing.
Research from the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) |
