Jeakins, Dorothy

Stage, screen and television costume designer, Dorothy Jeakins (1914-1995) was born in San Diego, California. She won a scholarship to the Otis Art Institute, worked for the WPA and Walt Disney Studios. She designed costumes for dozens of films, winning three Academy Awards for Joan of Arc, 1948, starring Ingrid Bergman and directed by Victor Fleming; Samson and Delilah, 1949, starring Victor Mature and Hedy Lamarr; and The night of the iguana, 1964, starring Richard Burton, Ava Gardner and Deborah Kerr. She died at the age of 81 at a nursing home in Santa Barbara, California.

From the guide to the Dorothy Jeakins costume designs, 1956-1964, (The New York Public Library. Billy Rose Theatre Division.)

Biography

Dorothy Jeakins was born January 11, 1914, in San Diego, California; her father, George Tyndall Jeakins, was a stockbroker, and her mother, Sophia Maria (von Kempf) Jeakins, was a couture dressmaker. After her parents separated, Jeakins was placed into foster care. Following graduation from Fairfax High School, in 1931, Jeakins submitted original drawings to a competition and won a three-year fine arts scholarship to the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, where she studied drawing and painting. Jeakins graduated from Otis in 1934 and joined the Works Progress Administration, Southern California Art Project as its youngest woman artist. In 1936 she accepted a position painting animated cells in the color department at the Walt Disney Studio, then in the late 1930s, she joined the Los Angeles department store I. Magnin, drawing fashion layouts in the advertising department. Her work caught the attention of a Twentieth Century Fox art director, who hired her as an assistant to illustrate costumes for the studio; she was eventually assigned as an assistant to costume designer Ernst Dryden.

After a short marriage Jeakins resumed her career in the mid-1940s and began sketching the couture creations of Balmain and Dior. In 1948 Jeakins became an assistant to the RKO studio costume designer Madame Karinska and worked on Joan of Arc (1948). She was awarded an Oscar for her work on this film, the first of three Oscars she would receive, out of twelve Academy Award nominations. Joan of Arc also made history as the first film to be recognized by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences for excellence in the category of costume design in color. In the years that followed, Jeakins built an impressive list of credits in theater, film, and television and came to be respected as one of the best costume designers. She was affiliated with nearly eighty film productions, including Samson and Delilah (1949), for which she earned her second Academy Award; The Children's Hour (1961); The Night of the Iguana (1964), a solo credit for which she received her third Academy Award; The Way We Were (1973); Young Frankenstein (1975); On Golden Pond (1981); and her last film, The Dead (1987).

Jeakins's strong ties with the theater brought opportunities on both East and West Coasts to work on productions for the American Shakespeare Festival, Los Angeles Civic Light Opera, UCLA University Theater Group, and Los Angeles Center Theater Group. Among her theater credits are King Lear (1950 and 1964), The World of Suzie Wong (1958), The Winters Tale (1958; 1960-61), Juno and the Paycock (1974), and both the Broadway and film versions of South Pacific and The Sound of Music . In 1962, Jeakins was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship to study traditional Japanese costume in Noh drama and spent a year in Tokyo. In 1969 she was appointed curator of costumes and textiles for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

From the guide to the Dorothy Jeakins costume design archive, 1932-1975, (University of California, Los Angeles. Library. Performing Arts Special Collections.)