Phyllis Dalton dead at 99: British Oscar-winning costume designer has passed away

Oscar-winning costume designer Phyllis Dalton passed away at the age of 99 at her home in Somerset and her death was confirmed by her stepson James Barton. Phyllis Dalton was born in Chiswick, London on October 16, 1925, her mother Elizabeth worked at a bank whilst her father William was employed at the Great Western Railway.

According to The New York Times,” Phyllis began studying costume design at Ealing Art College at 13 and later became a code breaker in the Women’s Royal Naval Service at the facility at Bletchley Park, a role she once said she considered “unbelievably boring.”

Catherine, Princess of Wales’s grandmother Valerie Glassborrow had something in common with Phyllis Dalton as she was a codebreaker at Bletchley Park during World War II and when GCHQ, the UK's Signals Intelligence and Cyber Security agency, announced the release of its first-ever puzzle book in 2016, Catherine, Princess of Wales wrote the forward.

In the forward, the Princess of Wales wrote: "I have always been immensely proud of my grandmother, Valerie Glassborow, who worked at Bletchley Park during the Second World War.” She also wrote: "She and her twin sister, Mary, served with thousands of other young women as part of the great Allied effort to break enemy codes. They hardly ever talked about their wartime service, but we now know just how important the men and women of Bletchley Park were, as they tackled some of the hardest problems facing the country."

When it came to Phyllis Dalton’s career in costume, one of her first jobs was working on the melodrama Eye Witness in 1950. She also worked with Alfed Hitchcock on the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1956. She received acclaim for her costumes for two movies in the 1960s, Lawrence of Arabia in 1962 and Doctor Zhivago in 1965.

Phyllis Dalton also worked on Kenneth Branagh’s 1989 Henry V and was nominated for a Bafta for her last film credit, Much Ado About Nothing in 1993 (another Kenneth Branagh movie). In reference to working with Kenneth Branagh on Much Ado About Nothing, Phyllis said “Those girls’ costumes; he wanted them pale, he wanted them to look as if they worked, he wanted them earthy, he didn’t want jewellery, and he didn’t want corsets, he wanted their bosoms nearly hanging out but no corsets, which is quite a problem to do, you know, when you haven’t got any construction.”