My husband, Stuart Walker, who has died aged 91, was an award-winning manufacturing designer in movie and tv in a profession that spanned 50 years, the primary 30 on the BBC after which working freelance.
His BBC profession began in 1959 in Faculties Tv and by 1968 he had grow to be a senior designer within the BBC design division. He loved working collaboratively with most of the main administrators and producers of the day, balancing design necessities with imaginative visible options, leading to units created for the studio and on location. He labored on productions starting from Physician Who to Shakespeare, basic drama collection and up to date single performs.
He gained two Baftas, each for BBC work. The primary, in 1983, was for his design for the tv movie An Englishman Overseas, written by Alan Bennett and directed by John Schlesinger, for which Stuart turned Dundee right into a snowy and completely convincing Nineteen Fifties Moscow. His second was for Portrait of a Marriage (1990), a lavish interval drama collection based mostly on the e book by Nigel Nicolson in regards to the marriage of his dad and mom Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, and set in Edwardian England and France. He was nominated for a 3rd Bafta in 1994 for Scarlet and Black, set in Nineteenth-century France.
In 1988 his extraordinary bleak and expressionistic designs for Highway, a movie in BBC Two’s ScreenPlay anthology collection written by Jim Cartwright, directed by Alan Clarke and set in a disadvantaged working-class space of Lancashire in Nineteen Eighties Britain, gained him a Royal Tv Society award.
Stuart was born in Manchester to William, a salesman, and his spouse, Annie (nee Jackson), an accounts clerk. He had a youthful sister, Shirley. Together with his father away through the second world battle, the household moved to Blackpool, the place at 13 he went to Blackpool junior artwork college, subsequently finding out on the important Blackpool Artwork Faculty from the age of 16 to twenty.
Graduating with a first-class nationwide diploma in design and portray in 1952, he went on the next yr to the Royal Academy Faculties in London, the place he accomplished a five-year diploma course – profitable a David Murray scholarship for panorama portray, a silver medal for drawing and a bronze medal for portray – earlier than becoming a member of the BBC.
I used to be lucky sufficient to work with Stuart as his artwork director through the late Nineteen Eighties, and we married in 2000. Publish-BBC he continued designing movie and TV productions till he was 78, together with The Camomile Garden (1992) for Channel 4, and he additionally taught on the Nationwide Movie and Tv Faculty. His movie work included A Non-public Operate (1984), directed by Malcolm Mowbray.
In 1989 he was appointed a Royal Designer for Trade. Admired for his skilled experience and aptitude, Stuart was additionally a lot revered by his colleagues for his private qualities of humility, kindness, integrity and management.
He’s survived by me, our son, Jack, his daughters, Anna and Lucy, from his first marriage, to Cherry Atkinson, which led to divorce, and his grandchildren, Milo, Sam and Joe.
