Ann_Roth

Ann Roth

Ann Roth

American costume designer

Ann Bishop Roth (born October 30, 1931) is an American costume designer. In a career spanning over six decades, she is recognized for her prolific work across stage and screen. She has received various accolades, including two Academy Awards, two BAFTA Awards, and a Tony Award.

Quick Facts Born, Education ...

Roth gained prominence for her collaborations with directors John Schlesinger, Mike Nichols, Anthony Minghella, and Stephen Daldry. She has been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Costume Design five times, winning two awards for The English Patient (1996) and Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (2020). She has also received four nominations for the BAFTA Award for Best Costume Design, winning for The Day of the Locust (1975) and Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. Roth, at the age of 91, makes a cameo appearance and shares a pivotal scene with Margot Robbie in Greta Gerwig's fantasy comedy film Barbie (2023).[2]

Life and career

Roth was born in Hanover, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Eleanor and James Roth.[1] Roth is a Carnegie Mellon graduate who began her career as a scenery painter for the Pittsburgh Opera. She intended to remain in the field of production design until she met Irene Sharaff at the Bucks County Playhouse. Sharaff invited her to California to assist her with costumes on the film Brigadoon and suggested Roth apprentice with her for five films and five Broadway productions before setting out on her own.[3]

Roth's first Hollywood film was 1964's The World of Henry Orient, where her designs included "monogrammed handmade yellow silk pajamas" for glamorous womanizer Peter Sellers.[2]

According to Glenn Frankel, Roth "designed not just costumes but characters" for the 1969 film Midnight Cowboy.[4][5] Roth found elegant but grimy white pants for Dustin Hoffman's character Ratso Rizzo on street-sale tables in New York City. Because Jon Voight's fringed suede jacket had to "look real and unhip," Roth made it herself. For Brenda Vaccaro's socialite character to wear in a sex scene, Roth paid $200 for a fox-fur jacket owned by one of her neighbors.[6]

Roth as costume designer created a "show-stopping" nightgown for Barbra Streisand to wear in her first non-musical film The Owl and the Pussycat (1970). The short black nightgown featured appliqué pink hands cupping the breasts[7] and (to quote Roth's own description, "a heart on her pee-pee."[2] Interviewed in 2013 about the origins of the costume idea, Roth said that her research included "looking for dirty, erotic, skuzzy underwear" in the pornographic magazine Screw, after which "somehow or another I made it up."[8] Roth later re-used her hands-on-breasts design for the 2013 stage play The Nance,[8] which won that year's Tony Award for costume design.[9]

Roth's first Oscar nomination was for 1984's Places in the Heart, set in Depression-era Texas.[10] Roth persuaded Sally Field that, for her "going-into-town-to-ask-for-a-loan-at-the-bank" scenes, a 1930s-type crotchless girdle would help her to walk and sit the right way.[2] The costume Oscar that year, however, went to Miloš Forman's Amadeus.[11]

Roth's costumes for three distinct time frames in The English Patient (1996) earned her first Oscar. According to producer Saul Zaentz, Roth worked for half her usual salary on the film "because she believed in the screenplay."[12] Roth's research for the costumes included the British Royal Geographical Society archives and 1930s photos of Egypt by photojournalist Lee Miller. Many of the film's varied military uniforms were authentic from the period; others were copied line-for-line from originals by a Savile Row tailor.[13][14]

Also in 1996, Roth did costumes for The Birdcage, a comedy film starring starring Robin Williams and Nathan Lane as the flamboyant owners of a Florida drag club. Talking about his costume, Williams remembered "those ballroom pants and the silk shirts with the shoulder pads. The details were amazing. This was a guy who was still living in the ’70s. The clothes captured exactly who Armand was for me."[12]

Her most-awarded film was 2020's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, where her costume designs (including flapper costumes and a rubber body suit for Viola Davis based on the body measurements of Aretha Franklin) won the Costume Designers Guild Award for Excellence in Period Film, Britain's BAFTA, and the Academy Award for Best Costume Design.[15]

In the 2023 film Barbie, Roth appears onscreen in a cameo role, portraying and credited as "the woman on a bench." In the scene, Barbie sits down besides Roth and tells the 91 year-old that she is "so beautiful", and Roth responds with a smile, "I know it."[2] In a Rolling Stone interview, director Greta Gerwig said that the brief scene "doesn’t lead anywhere" but "If I cut the scene, I don’t know what this movie is about."[16] Maureen Dowd in The New York Times described Roth's interaction with Barbie as a "pivotal scene."[2]

Roth's more than one hundred screen credits for costume design include The World of Henry Orient, Midnight Cowboy, Klute, Working Girl, Silkwood, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Mambo Kings, The Birdcage, Primary Colors, Cold Mountain, Closer, Freedomland, The Good Shepherd, Margot at the Wedding, Mamma Mia!, Evening, and Ma Rainey's Black Bottom.

Roth's dozens of stage credits include The Odd Couple, The Star-Spangled Girl, Purlie, Seesaw, They're Playing Our Song, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Biloxi Blues, Butley, The Vertical Hour, Deuce, and The Waverly Gallery.

Multiple collaborations

Filmography

Film

More information Year, Title ...

Television

More information Year, Title ...

Theatre

Work as a costume designer[18]

More information Year, Title ...

Awards and nominations

Main article: List of awards and nominations received by Ann Roth

Academy Awards

More information Year, Category ...

Primetime Emmy Awards

More information Year, Category ...

Tony Awards

More information Year, Category ...

References

  1. [1]
    "The Evening Sun from Hanover, Pennsylvania on July 6, 1964 · 6". Newspapers.com. 6 July 1964.
  2. [2]
    Dowd, Maureen (July 23, 2023). "Ann Roth Is Hollywood's Secret Weapon". The New York Times. Retrieved July 30, 2023. Ms. Roth has a pivotal scene with Margot Robbie in the "Barbie" movie, directed by her friend Greta Gerwig (Ms. Roth calls her "Gret").
  3. [3]
    "Ann Roth at LiveDesignOnline.com". Archived from the original on 2014-10-20. Retrieved 2008-03-04.
  4. [4]
    @frankelglenn (March 13, 2021). "How the great Ann Roth designed not just costumes but characters for Midnight Cowboy" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  5. [5]
    Frankel, Glenn (March 13, 2021). "Dressing Ratso". Air Mail. Retrieved July 30, 2023. Roth told me she starts from a simple premise: she doesn't just make costumes; she makes characters. The idea was to find the clothes Ratso would have bought from the places he would have bought them—or, in his case, the places he might have stolen them from
  6. [6]
    "Half a Century Later, the Clothes of Midnight Cowboy Still Speak Volumes". GQ. March 3, 2021. Retrieved July 30, 2023. As Midnight Cowboy's wildly talented costume designer Ann Roth demonstrated, clothes could mean as much, psychologically, as a performance or a line of dialogue
  7. [7]
    "Young Barbra Streisand stuns in unearthed pictures as she dons show-stopping nightgown". Daily Express. April 23, 2022. Her outfit featured a polka dot pattern and diamantés sewn into the spaghetti strap top. The unusual blouse also boasted a pattern cut in the shape of hands over either breast.
  8. [8]
    "Brooklyn designer suing Yoko Ono, but sexy concept dates to Barbra Streisand". Brooklyn Eagle. March 26, 2013. Retrieved July 30, 2023. A Brooklyn fashion designer is suing Yoko Ono for $10 million, claiming she ripped off her sexy clothing line featuring flimsy fabrics, cutouts and "hands" positioned over strategic body parts – a look made famous in 1970 by Barbra Streisand in the smash film The Owl and the Pussycat.
  9. [9]
    Official list of 2013 Tony Award Winners
  10. [10]
    "The talented Ann Roth". Live Design Online. February 1, 2000. Retrieved August 1, 2023. There are very few people who have done as much in the 30s as I have," she says, "but when I did English Patient, I wouldn't have dreamed of doing it without starting research again.
  11. [11]
    "Do the Oscars really reward the best costumes?" BBC (January 30, 2020)
  12. [12]
    "Costumes with character". Morning Call. April 3, 1997. Retrieved August 3, 2023. Roth, a native of Hanover, York County, has lived in Martins Creek since 1969, when she moved there from Manhattan with her husband, the now-deceased lighting designer Harry Green.
  13. [13]
    "A Thousand Shades of Weather-Beaten Khaki". LA Times. November 14, 1996. Retrieved August 3, 2023. Relying on such sources as the British Royal Geographic Society archives, including photos of a map-making expedition believed to have included de Almasy, Roth learned that, on safari, the men occasionally dressed in suits and the women in furs.
  14. [14]
    "Ann Roth". Netflix Queue. April 1, 2021. Retrieved August 3, 2023.
  15. [15]
    "Oscar Winning Costume Designer Ann Roth: "It's Not The Costume, It's The Character"". The Observer. January 26, 2022. Retrieved July 30, 2023. In October, she received her third Lifetime Achievement Award—this, the Ming Cho Lee Award from the Henry Hewes Design Awards. She also has the Irene Sharaff Award from the Theater Development Fund and a place in the Theater Hall of Fame on the walls of the Gershwin.
  16. [16]
    "The Brain Behind 'Barbie': Inside the Brilliant Mind of Greta Gerwig". Rolling Stone. July 3, 2023. Retrieved July 30, 2023. I love that scene so much. And the older woman on the bench is the costume designer Ann Roth. She's a legend.
  17. [17]
    IMDB
  18. [18]
    "Internet Broadway Date Base: Ann Roth". IBDB. Retrieved 5 March 2020.
  19. [19]
    "The 57th Academy Awards (1985) Nominees and Winners". oscars.org. Retrieved 2011-10-13.
  20. [20]
    Van Gelder, Lawrence (March 25, 1997). "'English Patient' Dominates Oscars With Nine, Including Best Picture". The New York Times. Retrieved June 18, 2008.
  21. [21]
    "The 69th Academy Awards (1997) Nominees and Winners". oscars.org. Archived from the original on 2014-10-06. Retrieved 2011-10-23.
  22. [22]
    "Oscar nominations 2000". The Guardian. February 15, 2000. Retrieved March 5, 2020.
  23. [23]
    "Complete List of Oscar winners". The Guardian. March 24, 2003. Retrieved March 5, 2020.
  24. [24]
    Davis, Clayton (2021-03-11). "2021 Oscars Predictions: All Awards Categories". Variety. Retrieved 2021-03-15.
  25. [25]
    Ordoña, Michael (April 25, 2021). "Ann Roth is now the oldest woman to win a competitive Oscar". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved April 27, 2021.
  26. [26]
    Coleman, Nancy (April 26, 2021). "Firsts and other breakthroughs at the Oscars". The New York Times. Retrieved April 27, 2021.
  27. [27]
    "IMDB: Ann Roth". Internet Movie Data Base. 5 March 2020. Retrieved 5 March 2020.
  28. [28]
    Purcell, Carey " 'Kinky Boots', 'Vanya and Sonia', 'Pippin' and 'Virginia Woolf?' Are Big Winners at 67th Annual Tony Awards" Archived 2013-06-11 at the Wayback Machine playbill.com, June 9, 2013
  29. [29]
    "2016 Tony Awards: The Winners List". The Hollywood Reporter. 12 June 2016. Retrieved April 28, 2021.
  30. [30]
    "Tony Award Winners 2018: The Complete List". variety.com. 11 June 2018. Retrieved April 28, 2021.
  31. [31]
    "Hadestown, The Ferryman Lead 2019 Tony Award Winners". Vulture. 9 June 2019. Retrieved April 28, 2021.
Share this article:

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Ann_Roth, and is written by contributors. Text is available under a CC BY-SA 4.0 International License; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.