At the Almeida theatre in Islington, in 2000, Eileen Diss, the Bafta award-winning television and stage designer, who has died aged 93, conjured a double bill of Harold Pinter plays – an early one, The Room, set in an ordinary large house, and a new piece, Celebration, set in a swanky metropolitan restaurant, not unlike the Ivy.
It was one of many collaborations she had with Pinter, and it exemplified her meticulous, poetically imagined but still naturalistic talent for reproducing the writer’s imagination in concrete terms. She was never abstract or surreal in her designs, but specialised, in her theatre work, in evocative interiors.
Having started in BBC television in 1952 – designing Billy Bunter of Greyfriars School; The Grove Family (often called the first TV soap); David Attenborough’s groundbreaking Zoo Quest (capturing animals in the wild for zoos); and the brilliant Maigret series, in grainy, cinematic black and white, starring Rupert Davies and Ewen Solon (“You can smell the Pernod,” said one critic) – she branched out into film and theatre.
She had success with Joseph Losey’s film version of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1973) with Jane Fonda; Pinter’s Betrayal (1983), directed on film by David Jones; and Evelyn Waugh’s luscious A Handful of Dust (1988), directed by Charles Sturridge.
On film, stage and television, she collaborated with Pinter, as either writer or director, or both, at least two dozen times, starting with Tea Party on BBC television in 1965, developed from a short story, with Leo McKern and Pinter’s then wife, Vivien Merchant, for a European Broadcasting Union commission in 12 countries.
By then, she had left the BBC design team and made her first theatre design for Pinter at the Mermaid theatre in Puddle Dock. He directed Exiles, James Joyce’s only play, in 1970, and the experience came as a shock: the BBC, she said, had a 24-hour workshop serving 12 studios, while the Mermaid had little money and less back-up: “It was one bloke and a hammer.”
As Zoe Williams said in this newspaper in 2019, her influence on BBC design work, “a slightly crazy mix of boarding-school perfectionism and free-spirited iconoclasm”, was baked in. As for the values of TV production in the 60s and 70s, “You can’t watch Diss’s Cider With Rosie [a beautiful 1971 film directed by Claude Whatham] or Moll Flanders [1975, another triumph, directed by Donald McWhinnie] without seeing the values.”
The first of her four (similar) designs for Pinter’s The Caretaker was spectacularly cluttered, while her fourth, starring Jonathan Pryce as Davies (he had been Mick at the National Theatre in 1980), in Bath and Liverpool in 2009 and London in 2010, would take a fortnight to inventory: a tumultuous tip of a room decked out with iron bed, gas stove, bucket for a leaky ceiling, a chubby Buddha in a sea of newspapers, planks of wood, kitchen accessories.
On film, her obsessive attention to detail made life challenging for even the most experienced of crews. On set in the 80s, soon after trainers with reflector pads on their heels became de rigueur, one harassed props man affectionately requested that Eileen should have her reflectors on the front “so that we can see her coming”.
Eileen was born in Leytonstone, east London, the only child of Thomas Diss, a dentist, and his wife, Winifred (nee Irvine), and was educated at Ilford county high school for girls – a school outing to see Laurence Olivier’s film of Henry V in 1945 made an indelible, influential impression on her – and the Central School of Arts and Crafts (now Central Saint Martins, part of the University of the Arts London). She met her future husband, Raymond Everett, an aviator with the RAF and BOAC, at a school dance and married him in 1953.
As well as with Pinter, she had close collaborations with Simon Gray, whose plays – Butley (1971) and Otherwise Engaged (1975), both starring Alan Bates, The Rear Column (1978), Quartermaine’s Terms (1981) and The Late Middle Classes (1999) – she designed alongside Pinter as director, all pitch perfect in tone and presentation, the last skilfully containing a 50s childhood within an 80s framework. The two also worked together on David Mamet’s exploration of sexual harassment, Oleanna, when it came to the Royal Court in 1993, transferring to the Duke of York’s the following year.
Over six years from the end of the 60s, she designed several televised opera productions, including The Merry Widow and The Yeoman of the Guard; and her classy TV series included Tom Sharpe’s Porterhouse Blue (1988), adapted for Channel 4 by Malcolm Bradbury; Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie as Jeeves and Wooster (1990-93) for ITV, for which she won a Bafta in 1992; and Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time (1997), adapted by Hugh Whitemore and produced for Channel 4 by Alvin Rakoff, who also co-directed with Christopher Morahan.
Diss had known Rakoff since early days, each starting out at the BBC. She kept in touch and designed the television version of Whitemore’s The Best of Friends (1991), with John Gielgud, which Rakoff directed, and reunited with him at the Mill at Sonning, Berkshire, a cosy dinner theatre run by the actor Sally Hughes who was Rakoff’s partner and, later, second wife.
Their collaborations included Too Marvellous for Words (2002), about the life and songs of Johnny Mercer, on an ingeniously arranged set of four moving blocks; a similar tribute show to Doris Day, A Sentimental Journey (2009), with Sally as Doris, written by Sally’s film-maker son, Adam Rolston; and a version of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (2011), in which Diss cleverly used back projections made in pen and ink to create a suitably film noir edge.
She loved working with the Sonning stage crew, as she did with Pinter and Gray, the playwright Brian Friel (on two plays of his at Hampstead theatre in the 1980s, Translations, and its farcical riposte, The Communication Cord), the lighting designer Mick Hughes and her own daughter, Dany, a costume designer.
In all, she won six Baftas, and a Bafta lifetime achievement award in 2006, and was honoured in 1975 by the Royal Society of Arts as a Royal Designer for Industry, the highest accolade for designers in all disciplines in the UK.
Her husband Raymond predeceased her in 1994, but she stayed on in the Kensington home they had shared for 40 years, and is survived by Dany, her sons Tim and Matthew, and by six grandchildren.
• Eileen Winifred Diss, stage, television and film designer, born 13 May 1931; died 5 November 2024
