Our Daily Dead

LA Times
John Box, four-time Academy Award-winning art director and production designer who re-created wintry Russia in midsummer Spain for “Doctor Zhivago” and built lavish dreamscapes for other period productions, has died. He was 85.

Box died March 7 in Leatherhead, Surrey, England, of natural causes associated with aging.

The Briton collected an impressive four Oscars for epic films released from 1962 through 1971: “Lawrence of Arabia,” “Doctor Zhivago,” “Oliver!” and “Nicholas and Alexandra.” He was also nominated for Academy Awards for his work on the 1972 film “Travels With My Aunt” and the 1984 “Passage to India.”

Box earned Britain’s equivalent of the Oscar, the British Film Academy Award, (for best art direction for re-creating 16th century England for the 1966 “A Man for All Seasons,” imagining early 20th century America for “The Great Gatsby” in 1974 and conjuring the game as well as the arena for the futuristic 1975 “Rollerball.” He also received the British Film Academy Award for special contribution to filmmaking in 1991 and a Film Critics’ Circle Award for lifetime achievement in 1999.

Among his more recent films were “Black Beauty” in 1994 and “First Knight” in 1995, starring Sean Connery as King Arthur and Richard Gere as Lancelot, for which he built a Camelot from scratch in a Welsh reservoir.

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