Three production designers will be inducted into the Art Directors Guild Hall of Fame at the guild’s 16th annual Excellence in Production Design Awards ceremony to be held at the Beverly Hilton Hotel Feb. 4. The guild’s awards committee and art directors council have named production designers Robert Boyle, William Darling and Alfred Junge as its latest Hall of Fame inductees.
“This continues to be a proud moment for our guild as we look to the past so we may build the bridges to our future,” said ADG president, Thomas A. Walsh. “The ADG Hall of Fame recognizes the many achievements of those artists who created and evolved the unique discipline of art direction for the moving image. Their creative legacy continues to inspire and challenge all of those who have chosen the art of production design as their profession and it is appropriate that we honor their memory through their induction into the ADG Hall of Fame.”
Robert F. Boyle (1909 – 2010)
Robert Francis Boyle started his career in film in 1933 as a draftsman in the Paramount Pictures art department, headed by supervising art director Hans Dreier. Beginning with Cecil B. DeMille‘s The Plainsman (1936), Boyle went on to work on a variety of pictures as a sketch artist and draftsman before becoming an art director at Universal Studios in the early 1940s. Boyle collaborated several times with Alfred Hitchcock, first as an assistant art director for Saboteur (1942) and later as a full-fledged production designer for North by Northwest (1959), The Birds (1963), and Marnie (1964). During the course of his career, Boyle was nominated four times for an Academy Award for best art direction. In 1997 he received the Art Directors Guild’s lifetime achievement award, and he was voted an honorary Academy Award in 2007 by the board of governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.
William S. Darling (1882-1964)
William S. Darling was born Vilmos Bela Sanderhazi in the twilight years of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Educated first in Budapest in the arts of architecture and painting, he received a scholarship to study at the prestigious Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. He began his career in early Hollywood designing silent films as William Fox’s supervising art director and continued in that role when Fox re-organized his company as Twentieth Century Fox Studios in 1933. He won an Academy Award for Cavalcade (1933), The Song of Bernadette (1943), and Anna and the King of Siam (1946). He was nominated for Lloyd’s of London (1936), Wee Willie Winkie (1937), The Rains Came (1939) and The Keys of The Kingdom (1944). His work appeared in 61 films between 1921 and 1954.
Alfred Junge (1886-1964)
Alfred Junge began his career in film at Berlin’s UFA studios, as an art director from 1920 until 1926, when he joined the production team of director E.A. Dupont who was relocating to British International Pictures in London. Junge has been credited with originating the role of supervising art director within the British film industry of the 1930’s. In 1939, he worked with Michael Powell and Emerick Pressburger on Contraband (1940), the first of eight pictures Junge made with them. The last of these was Black Narcissus (1947); the striking sets of the Himalayas earned Junge the Academy Award for best art direction. He also received a second nomination in 1953 for the Arthurian epic Knights of the Round Table (1953).
Nominations for the 16th Annual ADG Awards will be announced on Jan. 4. On awards night, Feb. 4, the ADG will present winners in nine competitive categories for theatrical films, television productions, commercials and music videos along with the guild’s lifetime achievement award to production designer Tony Walton and another soon to be announced for outstanding contribution to cinematic imagery. For the third consecutive year Paula Poundstone is set to host this year’s show, which is themed to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Guild. Co-producers for the ADG awards are Tom Wilkins and Greg Grande.
