Michael Stringer

Film designer

In love with films as a teenager, Michael Stringer created a model for himself of his local cinema on which he would update the poster displays. He later became an RAF pilot in the Second World War and went on to design the hit war film 633 Squadron (1964) and more than 50 other motion pictures before retiring to Sussex to become a painter specialising in local scenes.

John Michael Stringer, film production designer and art director, painter and illustrator: born Singapore 26 July 1924; twice married (two daughters); died Eastbourne, East Sussex 7 March 2004.

In love with films as a teenager, Michael Stringer created a model for himself of his local cinema on which he would update the poster displays. He later became an RAF pilot in the Second World War and went on to design the hit war film 633 Squadron (1964) and more than 50 other motion pictures before retiring to Sussex to become a painter specialising in local scenes.

Born in Singapore in 1924, he was raised in Britain from the age of three and went to Selwyn College, Cambridge, joining the University Air Squadron at 18 and becoming a Flight-Lieutenant by the time of the Rhine Crossing Operation in 1945.

"I picked up a book by Edward Carrick about designing films and it really caught my imagination," he recollected in 1997. When he was demobbed in 1946, Stringer joined the staff of the film art director Norman Arnold and worked his way up from junior draughtsman to assistant. After contributing to the controversial political comedy Chance of a Lifetime (1950) he was engaged by its star and director, Bernard Miles, to co-design the first Mermaid Theatre in Elizabethan style in Miles's back garden in St John's Wood, north London. (He designed stage sets at the later Mermaid Theatre at Puddle Dock, near Blackfriars Bridge, for productions of The Tempest, Brecht's Galileo and others.)

He became a full art director with the government-sponsored production outfit Group Three, designing such films as the coal-mining drama The Brave Don't Cry (1952) and the comedy The Oracle (1953). His art direction of Rank's unexpected comedy hit Genevieve (1953), one of his favourite films, led to subsequent work for Rank on such glossy fluff as An Alligator Named Daisy (1955) and dramas like Windom's Way (1957), set in Malaya. He recalled,

As art director, you are responsible for designing the set, the props, the colours and finding locations to shoot the film. One of the nicest people I worked with was Walt Disney. I was involved in eight of his productions and found him extremely pleasant and friendly.

The most spectacular of the Disney assignments was In Search of the Castaways (1962).

He travelled all over the world on various films, researching locations to be used for shooting or to be reproduced back in the studio. He worked on Fred Zinnemann's memorable The Sundowners (1960), set down under with Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr. For the elegiac Robin and Marian (1976), he recreated Sherwood Forest in northern Spain, because its star, Sean Connery, was in self-imposed tax exile.

For the thriller Return from the Ashes (1966), set in France, he built a huge street set and all the interiors so that it could be shot entirely in a British studio. And, on another film set in France, Inspector Clouseau (1968), he adapted part of Billingsgate Market to stand in for Paris - this was a sad follow-up to A Shot in the Dark (1964) which Stringer also designed, where he suggested viewing the various happenings in a country mansion in the opening sequence through lighted windows from outside.

Stringer had a distinctive way of working. Norman Dorme, who worked with him on many productions, notes:

Michael did storyboard sketches but he also did an aerial view of a set. All his set sketches were like that. No one else I

worked with ever did that sort of thing. It gave a tremendous amount of information. They were very precise and detailed.

Stringer explained much about art direction generally and his own approach, in contributing to a textbook, Film Design (1974), when he was President of the Guild of Film Art Directors.

Some of Stringer's best work was done on films that proved to be of little merit otherwise. Take Casino Royale (1967), the Bond spoof messily directed by John Huston, among others, on which the leading art director Stuart Craig worked early in his career, under Stringer's tutelage. Craig recalls:

That film was an amazing achievement design-wise. It was done on such a lavish scale, with cowboys and horses riding through this massive casino. Today, that would be a minimal amount of set and the upper parts of it would be a computer- generated matte painting - it wouldn't physically exist. They had a lot more work to do in those days.

And then Craig reflects on Alfred the Great (1969), which starred David Hemmings:

Michael did amazingly complicated and splendid designs in rural Galway. We built a temporary studio on some farmland with dressing rooms and a generator. And I

remember we had the opening shot rather like the Bayeux Tapestry in that you saw this horseman galloping past peasants in wheat fields and growing flax and building haystacks and mending carts, and this landscape was designed and dedicated to this particular shot.

The big sound stage that we built had an open side so that the horsemen were able to ride through this rural landscape up to the door of a chapel and then dismount and walk into the chapel which was built inside the stage, so you got this most amazing long-developing shot. It was very, very ambitious and a sign of his braveness.

Stringer's work as art director on Fiddler on the Roof (1971), involving much shooting in Yugoslavia, earned him an Academy Award nomination shared with the Hollywood production designer Robert Boyle and set decorator Peter Lamont, but they lost to Nicholas and Alexandra. His later assignments included The Greek Tycoon (1978), The Awakening (1980), The Mirror Crack'd (1980), and The Jigsaw Man (1983) before he moved into television with excellent sets for the Ian Richardson version of The Hound of the Baskervilles (1983). He designed the TV series Paradise Postponed (1986) and, as in the earlier Inspector Clouseau, his resemblance to Harold Wilson led to his making a cameo appearance as the former prime minister.

It is in the nature of the work that good art direction and production design often pass unnoticed, taken for granted. But the epic sets of period films cry out to be admired and one of Stringer's most spectacular reconstructions, at Pinewood Studios, was the Forum at Pompeii for the TV mini-series The Last Days of Pompeii (1984).

In 1975 Stringer had devised and illustrated two children's books, The Magic Carpet Adventure and a sequel. In the 1990s he left films, devoted himself to painting in his lucid and colourful style, favouring aerial views, and exhibited both locally and around the world. His last connection with show business came in 2001 when the Devonshire Park Theatre in Eastbourne placed his vivid depiction of local life on its safety curtain.

Allen Eyles