![]() I can’t draw anyhow.”īeavan is in her early 70s now, and although she has enjoyed not working for the past few months, she is thinking about her next projects. ![]() “I never draw, I think it’s two-dimensional. Beavan’s ideas come first from the script, then she throws herself into research, creating mood boards. It is set in the 50s and the clothes are, of course, wonderful – you have to believe that a dress could be so exquisite, and made with such haute couture artistry, that Ada becomes obsessed with it – but even the floral tabards she wears while she’s cleaning are a thing of beauty. This time she is nominated for Mrs Harris Goes to Paris, a charming film about Ada Harris (played by Lesley Manville), a cleaner who falls in love with a Christian Dior gown belonging to a client and sets her heart on getting her own. Cruella, the 70s-set origin story of Cruella de Vil, followed that. ![]() She did the costumes for Gosford Park and The King’s Speech, then showed she didn’t just do period Englishness when in 2015 she did Mad Max: Fury Road, the fourth film in the post-apocalyptic franchise it brought her a second Academy Award. She started in period costume: Beavan was Merchant Ivory’s go-to costume director, winning her first Oscar in 1987 for A Room With a View, and nominated over the next few years for films including Howards End, The Remains of the Day and Sense and Sensibility. Where are the others? She looks a bit sheepish and says they’re elsewhere in the house, because there are so many. Her office is lined with books (histories of Palestinian costume, Indian art, the fashion of the French Revolution, and on and on), as well as some of her awards, including her four Baftas. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardianīeavan’s house is filled with collections and curios, though done with such an expert eye – she started as a theatre set designer – that it doesn’t look cluttered. ‘It’s more than just putting clothes on actors – you are there as a sort of therapist’ …Beavan at her London home. I’ve been very good, I’ve never divulged.” Thank God I’ve got a really pants memory and can’t remember a thing, because I do hear some fairly intimate stuff. Does she get good gossip? “Oh yeah,” she says, with a glint of mischief. If you were a film star, you would think nothing of telling her all your secrets while she was dressing you. ![]() Beavan has a straightforward, no-nonsense manner, but she’s also incredibly warm, her grey curls bouncing around her face, so the effect isn’t austere but fun and surprisingly comforting. We are sitting in her office at the back of her beautiful London house, where she has lived for more than 30 years. I snuck a photo.” Elements of it might make it into a film – “I might be doing something to do with ghosts” – but it will be squirrelled away in Beavan’s mind, even if she can’t find the actual photo now to show me. She was amazing she looked like a sort of strange clown. I don’t know whether she was from a sect or something – she was wearing white and had the most extraordinary white hat on. She took a secret photo the other day, she says, of “a fabulous woman. “I am the biggest people-watcher ever,” says Beavan, the British costume director who is up for her fourth Oscar next month. I f you spot a woman trying to surreptitiously take a photo of you on the bus – you’d have to look interesting – there’s a fair chance it might be Jenny Beavan.
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