The film musical Mary Poppins was instantly recognised as a visual masterpiece on its release in 1964, when it won Julie Andrews an Oscar for her performance as the Banks’s children’s nanny and gave Walt Disney his biggest box-office success to date. Andrews’s then husband, Tony Walton, who has died aged 87 after suffering a stroke, was responsible for the set and costume design that brought a magical look to a screen fantasy combining live action with animation.
He was thrilled that the Sherman brothers, Richard and Robert, who wrote the songs, suggested switching the story to late-Edwardian 1910 from the 1930s setting of PL Travers’s original book and its sequels, because Disney had acquired rights to the story but not the illustrations. “I love the turn-of-the-century look,” he said in a 2011 interview. “I loved to design for it, so that was a godsend for me.”
Particularly memorable was Cherry Tree Lane, the London street where the Banks family live at No 17. In his teens, Walton had disliked the perfect, flat cobblestone streets he saw in the film musical An American in Paris, starring Gene Kelly. Looking for more realism, he came up with a curved street with a slight incline.
Designing the costumes was similarly satisfying for Walton. He went for a mix of “sombre seriousness and playfulness” for Andrews’s garments, in grey, black and slate colours – but hinting at the nanny’s secret life by creating linings that gave flashes of crimson and other bright colours. Daisies and cherries were featured on her black hat.
For Mary Poppins’s cockney friend and jack-of-all-trades, Bert, played by Dick Van Dyke (who also acted the ageing bank director, Mr Dawes Sr), Walton came up with a “jolly holiday” design of tangerine, cherry, and raspberry stripes, created by sewing different widths of ribbon on to a white jacket.
Meanwhile, Glynis Johns sought to influence her own costume by telling Walton: “Now, Tony, I know I am playing a suffragette, but we are going to make me pretty, aren’t we?”
Walt Disney himself worked closely with Walton on Mary Poppins. “Frequently, he was the one who came up with inventive ideas,” said the designer, who insisted that he never sought to imprint his own trademark on any production. “I begin each project as though I’ve never done one before,” he explained.
Mary Poppins earned him the first of five Oscar nominations, this and two others – Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and The Wiz (1978) – for costume design.
For best art direction, he gained another nomination on The Wiz, and finally won an Academy Award as a member of the design team on All That Jazz (1979), the director Bob Fosse’s autobiographical story starring Roy Scheider. Walton was responsible for the fantasy sequences, which were likened to the director Federico Fellini’s dazzlingly visual 1963 masterpiece 8½. One reviewer remarked that Walton’s sets contributed to the “overwhelming of the eye”.
On a rare excursion into television, he won an Emmy for a 1985 screen version of Death of a Salesman. The challenge was to create a set that could instantly transform into different rooms, from an Italian restaurant to a Boston hotel bedroom, to reflect everything happening in the mind of Willy Loman, the self-deluded protagonist in Arthur Miller’s play.
Meanwhile, Walton’s long career in theatre garnered 16 Tony nominations, with wins for Pippin (1973), House of Blue Leaves (1986) and a Broadway revival of Guys and Dolls (1992), distinguished by its garish, fantasy-cartoon New York sets – including, wrote one reviewer, “a sewer as epic as the whale’s belly in Pinocchio”.
Anthony was born in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, to Hilda (nee Drew) and Lancelot Walton, a surgeon. He was kicked out of his classics class at Radley college, Oxfordshire, at the age of 14 after reading a poem in a Liverpudlian accent, and moved to the City of Oxford School of Technology, Art and Commerce.
Although he was expected to follow his father into medicine, his hobbies pushed him towards the stage. He enjoyed making and dressing marionettes and, aged 16, led a group of theatre students putting on puppet shows featuring music hall and the operas of Mozart and Gilbert and Sullivan.
Some were performed in the gardens of Christ Church, Oxford, and he created the sets and operated the lighting. When the painter and stage designer John Piper saw one, he told Walton that he should follow a career in production design.
By then, he had already met Andrews, a child star whom he saw on the London stage and discovered she lived with her mother in his own town, Walton-on-Thames. More than 10 years later, in 1959, they married. Divorce followed after nine years, but they remained friends and he later designed the sets and costumes for a 2003 New York revival of The Boy Friend directed by Andrews, almost 50 years after she began her Broadway career in the starring role.
Following his studies at the Slade School of Fine Art, when he also acted at Wimbledon theatre, and national service with the RAF as a trainee pilot in Canada, Andrews invited him to Broadway, where she was starring in My Fair Lady (1956) and Walton was mesmerised by that and other shows.
His early career included designing sets and costumes for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, both on Broadway (1962) and in the West End (1963). For the 1966 film version, he gave a more realistic look to the back streets of ancient Rome compared with what one critic described as the stage show’s “cardboard, vaudevillian unreal quality with colourful baggy pants and houses spilling down a hillside basking in bright sunlight”.
In 1975, he was set designer on the original Broadway production of Chicago. Later, he directed New York stage productions.
In 1991, Walton married the writer Gen LeRoy. She survives him, along with Emma, the daughter of his marriage to Andrews, and Bridget, his stepdaughter.
• Tony (Anthony John) Walton, production and costume designer, born 24 October 1934; died 2 March 2022
