Josie McAvin: The distinguished film-set decorator, Josie McAvin, who died last week, was the only Irish person with the distinction of winning both an Oscar - for Out Of Africa in 1986 - and its television equivalent, the Emmy, for the 1994 mini-series, Scarlett, the sequel to Gone With The Wind.
She was born and raised in Dublin, one of six children in the family of John and Mollie McAvin. Her father worked in the cattle export trade and was the last elected high sheriff of Dublin.
"He died when I was quite young," she said in an interview with The Irish Times last July, "and I think he might have been horrified to learn that I went to work in the film industry."
She had been working as a physical education teacher when her cousin, Maureen Halligan, married Ronald Ibbs, and they started a theatre company, taking McAvin on tour with them.
In the 1950s she went to work as a stage manager at the Gate Theatre, during the reign of Hilton Edwards and Micheál Mac Liammoir. "Hilton and Micheál were great to work with," she said, "but I loved the road, and when Maureen and Ronnie started touring America, I became their advance manager, going out ahead of them and setting everything up for them. I just loved it."
In 1958 Michael Anderson was preparing to direct the Black and Tans drama, Shake Hands With The Devil, which starred James Cagney and Dana Wynter, and a designer friend told McAvin that the producers needed somebody to organise props for the film. "I hadn't a clue about working in films, but I joined them," she said.
Her job as a set decorator on films entailed reading the screenplay, discussing it with the production designer, doing a detailed breakdown of the script and noting every item needed for each scene in the film.
"If you get on with the production designers, you will be asked to work with them again and again," she said. "If you don't get on, you may be gone within the first two weeks. I was never actually fired, but I came close to it a few times. But I worked on six films directed by Tony Richardson, and that was all through the same designer."
Her films with Richardson in the 1960s included The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner, Tom Jones, The Loved One and The Sailor From Gibraltar.
She also worked with John Huston on three films - Sinful Davey, A Walk With Love and Death and his memorable swansong, The Dead, which she ranked along with Neil Jordan's Michael Collins as her two favourite productions from all the many films on which she worked.
Some directors were not as easy to deal with as Richardson and Huston, and in 1969 McAvin found herself working in the Alps with Michael Winner - and Oliver Reed and an elephant - on Hannibal Brooks.
"Michael is a very difficult man," she said. "If you show any weakness whatsoever, he will go for it. There was one highly respected location manager on the film, and Michael was a terror to him. The man ended up having a heart attack, and Michael came in the next day and said, 'There's one in hospital and there may be a lot more'.
"We were doing a night shoot in the Alps, and Michael asked us to find a house for a scene. The location manager found a house in the middle of nowhere, and this man came out in his nightshirt. He didn't know what was going on, but with the help of an interpreter we were allowed in and started preparing the scene. Michael came in puffing his big cigar and asked me what was inside one of the rooms. We opened the door and there was an old woman in bed, and Michael asked me: 'What's she doing here?' I had to explain to him that she lived there."
Among her many other film credits were David Lean's Ryan's Daughter, Jack Clayton's The Lonely Passion Of Judith Hearne, Lewis Gilbert's Educating Rita, Matt Clark's film of Hugh Leonard's play, Da, and her final film, Bruce Beresford's Evelyn, produced by, and starring, Pierce Brosnan.
As McAvin moved from one production to another - often working with her late sister, the props buyer, Sunny Mulligan - the recurring problem for her department was with budgetary restrictions, and sometimes having to find whatever she could coax for free. A rare exception was Michael Cimino's lavish epic 1980 western, Heaven's Gate, for which she was hired to work on the English section of the shoot.
Before winning her Oscar for Out Of Africa, McAvin was nominated for Tom Jones in 1964 and again three years later for The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, the Cold War thriller in which Dublin doubled for Berlin. It starred Richard Burton - who was accompanied by Elizabeth Taylor - and Claire Bloom.
"Liz never left the set," McAvin recalled, "especially if Richard had scenes with Claire Bloom. Liz was a beautiful woman with marvellous eyes." Coincidentally, when McAvin was nominated for Tom Jones, the Oscar for set design went to the Taylor-Burton epic, Cleopatra.
When she got the nomination for Out Of Africa, she said she expected the Oscar to go to the designers of Akira Kurosawa's Japanese epic, Ran.
"We were all congratulating the Japanese designer as we were sure he was going to win," she recalled. "The work he and his team did on that film was just wonderful.
"When Michael J. Fox announced that we had won, the first thing I did was to turn to the Japanese designer and tell him how sorry I was that he didn't win."
Josie McAvin: born April 23rd, 1919; died January 26th, 2005