Ian Whittaker obituary

The set decorator Ian Whittaker, who has died of prostate cancer aged 94, won an Oscar (shared with his long-time collaborator, the production designer Luciana Arrighi) for the 1992 screen version of EM Forster’s Howards End. This was among the best in a string of literary adaptations directed by James Ivory, produced by Ismail Merchant and scripted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Whittaker was in the running for another Oscar for the same team’s film of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1993), though his career was not confined to costume drama. “Council houses, stately homes, spaceships, I’ve done them all,” he said.

His first nomination was for Ridley Scott’s intergalactic horror smash Alien (1979). To build the futuristic interior of the Nostromo spacecraft, where most of the action takes place, he assembled bits and bobs of old washing machines: “We just stuck them on the wall and sprayed them white.”

He described his craft as “like creating an iceberg. Only 10 per cent of what you do is actually seen and 90 per cent is hidden, but it is important to create an atmosphere for the actors.” Ten per cent could be over-optimistic at times. For a 1990 TV adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea starring Anthony Quinn, private jets flew materials from Puerto Rico to the Virgin Islands, though none of the sets decorated by Whittaker ended up on screen.

He was born in London, to Hugh Whittaker, a stage manager who later became personal assistant to the actor George Arliss, and Hettie (nee Wilson), a musical theatre performer. When the second world war broke out, the family moved to Hayling Island in Hampshire, where they had a holiday home. Ian was educated at Portsmouth grammar school before another evacuation took him 50 miles away to Bournemouth.

Harbouring ambitions to be an actor, he enrolled at Rada in London, where his classmates included Roger Moore, Miriam Karlin and Yootha Joyce. He made his performing debut as an extra in the Old Vic company at the New theatre, London. In the famed 1945 production of Oedipus Rex, starring Laurence Olivier in the title role and Ralph Richardson as Tiresias, it was Whittaker who led Olivier on stage each night after Oedipus had blinded himself.

He was conscripted into the army at the age of 18 and posted to Trieste after applying for a transfer to the Forces Broadcasting Services. On his return to civilian life, his youthful appearance enabled him to play juvenile roles for many years. He starred in the London stage production of Cosh Boy, and was also in Lewis Gilbert’s 1953 film version. The director cast him as a queasy medical orderly in The Sea Shall Not Have Them (1954). In The Silent Enemy (1958), a thriller about the underwater commando Lionel “Buster” Crabb (Laurence Harvey), Whittaker played the one member of Crabb’s team who could not swim.

Bit parts followed in television and film, including uncredited appearances in Sink the Bismarck! (1960) and Billy Budd (1962). Having supplemented his acting work with painting and decorating, Whittaker sought a job in the art department and ended up on Catch Us If You Can (1965), John Boorman’s film with the Dave Clark Five. His tasks included transforming a decommissioned church in east London into the band’s living quarters.

From this moment on, he was never out of work as a set dresser, art director or set decorator. Assignments in the former capacity included Charlie Chaplin’s A Countess from Hong Kong (1967) – Chaplin, he said, “didn’t know how to use the vast sets he was given [and] just tucked himself away in a corner” – as well as The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968) and The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975).

Among his 13 collaborations with the director Ken Russell was The Devils (1971), featuring sets by the budding director Derek Jarman. For Russell’s rock opera Tommy (1975), in which the actor Ann-Margret writhes around in baked beans and chocolate, it was Whittaker’s idea to hang white curtains which could be easily replaced when the set inevitably became spattered with goo. On Walt Disney’s live-action ghost story The Watcher in the Woods (1980), he worked closely with its star, Bette Davis, familiarising her with her character’s cottage and props. “She was not so grand as to not let me help her get it right,” he noted.

He re-teamed with Boorman on The Emerald Forest (1985), for which he spent six months in Brazil locating props. He was set decorator on the Prince musical Under the Cherry Moon, and the fantasy adventure Highlander (both 1986), and on Ang Lee’s Oscar-winning Sense and Sensibility (1995). Anna and the King (1999), a version of The King and I with Jodie Foster, required Whittaker to build palaces on Malaysian golf courses.

His final job, which also marked his 15th collaboration with Arrighi, was on From Time to Time (2009), set in an enchanted manor house and directed by Julian Fellowes.

Whittaker is survived by his partner Michael Hickman, whom he met in 1999 and entered into a civil partnership with 10 years later, as well as by seven nieces and nephews.

• Ian Roy Whittaker, set decorator, born 13 July 1928; died 16 October 2022