COSTUME DESIGNER FOR CARRIE & PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE
Rosanna Norton, who was the costume designer for Phantom Of The Paradise and Carrie, died of cancer May 7 at 80, according to Variety.
Although Norton had said she was fired from the movie Tron (1982), she shared an Oscar nomination for her work on that film with Elois Jenssen. The Variety obit by Pat Saperstein highlights Norton's work in designing "Sissy Spacek’s iconic prom dress for Carrie:
“We had no money,” she recalled in a video interview about “Carrie.” She found many of the prom outfits in a store in the Valley that was going out of business, she said. But she had Carrie’s simple pale pink satin dress custom-made by a seamstress after changing the color from the original red in the book to create a more striking contrast with the blood that is splashed on Spacek.“At the time, prom dresses and bridesmaid dresses and things were very fussy. They had all these ruffles and detail and I wanted to do….a bias cut dress and I wanted it to be really simple and look as if she could have made it herself,” she told Birth Movies Death. “It didn’t have a lot of ruffles or detail work. It’s sort of a classic 1930s bias cut dress. I wanted her to look different from everybody else but beautiful at the same time, and all the other girls, they looked like teenage girls wearing these sort of ruffly, fancy, gathered dresses.”
In a Costume Designers Guild video on-stage interview, Norton tells the audience that she owed her career as costume designer to Brian De Palma, who allowed her artistic freedom, within each film's budget. Norton also spoke highly of Joe Dante, with whom she worked on Gremlins 2: The New Batch, Innerspace, The Explorers, and The 'Burbs. She also worked with Spacek and production designer Jack Fisk on Terrence Malick on Badlands (1973), prior to Phantom (1974) and Carrie (1976). Two years after Carrie, Norton worked with Nancy Allen again on Robert Zemekis' I Wanna Hold Your Hand.
Other films included Joan Micklin Silver’s Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979), Airplane! (1980), Airplane II (1982), RoboCop 2 (again with Nancy Allen, in 1990), Cisco Pike (1971), and The Stunt Man (1980).
Updated: Saturday, May 10, 2025 7:58 AM CDT
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