Academy and Emmy Award winning Irish art director, Josie MacAvin, passed away peacefully in the Blackrock Hospice on the 26th of January 2005 at the age of 85. She will be sadly missed by the Irish and international film and television communities.
Academy and Emmy Award winning Irish art director, Josie MacAvin, passed away peacefully in the Blackrock Hospice on the 26th of January 2005 at the age of 85. She will be sadly missed by the Irish and international film and television communities.
Josie began her career in 1959 with Michael Anderson’s ‘Shake Hands with the Devil'. In 1986 she won an Academy Award for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration for her work on Sydney Pollack’s ‘Out of Africa'. She was nominated for an Oscar on two other occasions, in 1966 in the Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, black-and-white category for ‘The Spy Who Came In from the Cold’ and in 1964 in the Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Color category for ‘Tom Jones'. She picked up an Emmy Award in 1995 for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Art Direction for a Miniseries or a Special for ‘Scarlett’.
Throughout her long and illustrious career as an art director/set designer, Josie worked extensively in the international film and television industries with some of the most well known actors in the world including James Cagney, Robert Mitchum, Richard Harris, Albert Finney, Orson Welles, Oliver Reed, Tom Cruise, Pierce Brosnan, Robert Redford, Martin Sheen, Julia Roberts, Angelica Huston and Meryl Streep.
Amongst her many Irish credits are; ‘Ryan's Daughter’ (1970) ‘Wuthering Heights’(1970), ‘Cal’ (1984), ‘Eat the Peach’ (1986), ‘The Dead’ (1987), ‘Far and Away’ (1992), ‘Michael Collins’ (1996), ‘The Butcher Boy’ (1997). Her last work in 2002 was on the feature film ‘Evelyn.’
IFTN would like to express our regret at the loss of Josie and our deepest sympathies go to her family, friends and colleagues.
