Phyllis Dalton: A Career in Costume

The extraordinary story of costume designer Phyllis Dalton, filled with insights, recollections, and revelations from a life spent on the great film locations of the twentieth century

In conversation with film historian Alexander Ballinger, Phyllis Dalton (1925–2025) reveals how she created some of the silver screen’s most unforgettable and iconic costumes, working with such legendary directors as Alfred Hitchcock and David Lean, a woman in a man’s world.
 
The book spans Dalton’s extraordinary fifty-year career in the film industry, from sewing in Soho workrooms on Laurence Olivier’s Henry V via intelligence work at Bletchley Park; apprenticeship at Gainsborough Studios to designing costumes on The Man Who Knew Too Much; the epic undertakings of costuming Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago (Oscar, Best Costume Design), and Oliver!; through to cult classics A Private Function and The Princess Bride to her successful late collaboration with a young Kenneth Branagh on Henry V (Oscar, Best Costume Design), Dead Again, and Much Ado About Nothing.
 
Many of the book’s illustrations, sourced from Dalton’s personal archive, showcase unique ephemera, fabric swatches, production stills, large format pencil-and-watercolour sketches, and production notebooks from six decades of filmmaking. Many of these stunning images, including Dalton’s personal on-location photographs from the Lawrence of Arabia shoot, have never been published before.
 
Distributed for Clapperboard Books