Clodagh Finn: Meet Josie MacAvin — Ireland’s unsung Oscar-winning set designer

And sure enough, they stand proud in the Institute’s lobby along with details of this singular woman’s rather unsung achievements. She won an Oscar for her set design on Out of Africa in 1986 and an Emmy in 1995 for her work on Scarlett, a TV mini-series that is a loose sequel to Gone with the Wind.

She also had two other Oscar nominations, for Tom Jones in 1964 and for The Spy Who Came In From The Cold in 1966.

The record-breaking double honour is “testament to her skill and versatility as a designer for both the big and small screen”, says the short bio accompanying the display.

You’d need an entire wall to capture the full extent of Josie MacAvin’s career. She worked with some of the world’s most famous directors on 40-plus feature films and several TV movies. Her film credits include, in no particular order, Ryan’s Daughter, The Field, Heaven’s Gate, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Educating Rita, The Butcher Boy, and her two favourites, John Huston’s The Dead and Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins.

Her behind-the-scenes work might not be instantly obvious, but without art directors, the magical Emerald City of the Wizard of Oz would look like more like The Twilight Zone. At least that’s how actor Michael J Fox put it when he and fellow presenter Rebecca de Mornay named Josie MacAvin and Stephen Grimes winners of the 1986 Oscar for art direction-set decoration.

A clearly astounded Josie accepted the award with a speech so short it might have set a record in itself. She thanked the man above, the Academy Awards, Out of Africa director Sydney Pollack, and she congratulated “everybody”.

If a single theme emerges from her surviving interviews, it is that she attributed her success to the aforementioned “everybody”. Film-making, and indeed set-decoration, was a collaborative process dependent on teamwork, she often said.

Yet, she was the one who took such pains with the minute details that build a credible whole. That might involve finding the perfect prop or tailoring an existing one to the film. In The Butcher Boy, for instance, she made sure there were tannin stains on the teapot in Francie Brady’s house.

She spent nine months living in Kenya when Sydney Pollack was directing Out of Africa, the epic romance starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford adapted from Danish writer Karen Blixen’s 1937 autobiography. (Josie’s Oscar was one of seven won by the film).

Her attention to detail is obvious in the material she left to the IFI. Two of the collection’s caretakers, Neil Moxham, film collections project officer, and Ella Squire, library and special collections officer, are kindly showing me a selection of books, stills, photographs and videos that paint a picture of a woman who decidedly avoided the limelight even if she mixed with those firmly within it.

There’s a photo of actor Michael Caine dedicated to her, and signed “with love”. There’s another from director Joseph Losey signed “with love and thanks” and wishing her good luck for the future.

Out of Africa set creation

A scrapbook, filled with photographs of the real Karen Blixen, gives an insight into how she created the sumptuous Out of Africa set. There’s a photo of a dining room table decked with silver, crystal and flowers, the small French clock Blixen received as a wedding present, her Corona typewriter and several of her outside; inspecting a coffee field, hunting a lion, and bending over a shot buffalo.

The film’s production notes describe how Josie MacAvin “combed the country" for household items that had once belonged to Blixen. Josie found her original bedroom furniture, bedstead, wardrobe and dressing table in Naivasha, a town northwest of Nairobi, and borrowed others — a chair, an ornately carved desk and a wooden trunk — from a local memorial library.

Despite her haul — gathered with the help of her sister, props buyer Sunny Mulligan — she incurred the wrath of the director when a gold fountain pen didn’t arrive in time to be exchanged as a gift between the lead characters. The production team sent a courier to Nairobi, but Sydney Pollack was not pleased.

As Josie MacAvin later recalled: “[He] told me that the film was costing so many million dollars and that this hold-up was going to cost so many thousand dollars. It’s pressure all the time on a film set.”

The rebuke was the exception, rather than the rule because, from her earliest days, her colleagues spoke highly of her incredible ‘eye’ and her craftsmanship.

'Lady'

In 1999, Clodagh Deeney described MacAvin as “a lady” in Film Ireland. This is why: “I use the word ‘lady’ deliberately. In all the conversations I have had with her co-workers, it is one of two words that have been used again and again to describe her. The other is ‘Talent’ (note the capital).”

By then, Josie MacAvin had been in the business almost 50 years. Born in Dublin on April 23, 1919, to Mollie and John MacAvin, she started her working life as a PE teacher. But, as she said many years later, PE work was not for her and she jumped at a chance to join a theatre company set up by her cousin, actor and casting director Maureen Halligan.

That led her to the Gate Theatre where she worked as stage manager with Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLíammóir. She got her first job as set decorator in 1958 on Shake Hands with the Devil, an Irish war of independence movie filmed in Dublin, starring James Cagney and Dana Wynter.

She was on her way.

The following year, in May 1959, when the Gate Theatre left for Paris to stage a production of St Joan by George Bernard Shaw, The Irish Times noted that Josie MacAvin would be the busiest — and best-equipped to deal with all backstage problems — as the company set off with “three tons of props and baggage”.

Her career and her reputation went from strength to strength over the next five decades. When she died, aged 86, in Dublin in January 2005, she was remembered as a distinguished film set decorator, even if she was not quite a household name.

But there is something quite fitting about that because as Niall Anderson, archive policy and project manager at the IFI, says: “Set decoration communicates a great deal of information very quickly often without drawing attention to itself.”

A bit like Josie herself.

However, that means it can be undervalued as an art which is why, he says, it is so good to see Josie’s Oscar and Emmy statues given pride of place in the IFI foyer. “It’s a recognition of Josie’s achievement, but also of the many types of talent and skill it takes to make a successful film.”

This Oscar season, go and see them for yourself and doff your cap to this talented woman who is no longer behind the scenes.