Four times he was nominated for Oscars for art direction during the 1960s and 1970s – for Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), on which he built his own version of Mount Rushmore; the comedy Chicago, Chicago (1969); the musical Fiddler on the Roof (1971); and John Wayne’s swansong western The Shootist (1976). He never won.
Eventually the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave him an honorary award two years ago “in recognition of one of cinema’s great careers in art direction” and, presumably, also as acknowledgement to his longevity. He was 98 by then.
Born Robert Francis Boyle in Hollywood in 1909, he studied architecture at the University of Southern California, but it proved difficult to find a job in the Depression. He managed to get casual work as an extra on films, which led to his engagement as a sketch artist and assistant set designer at Paramount in the mid-1930s.
During that decade, he worked with such legendary names as Cecil B DeMille and Fritz Lang. He was associate art director on Saboteur (1942), one of Hitchcock’s first Hollywood movies, which reaches its climax with a struggle on top of the Statue of Liberty.
By the mid-1940s, he had graduated to art director or production designer, the person who has overall responsibility for sets, costumes and props, and he honed his craft on dozens of forgettable movies before reuniting with Hitchcock on the spy thriller North by Northwest. It, too, climaxes with a vertiginous showdown, this time on Mount Rushmore.
It was undoubtedly one of his greatest achievements. He rebuilt Rushmore in the studio, but only after Hitchcock was finally persuaded that he could not film the entire climax with Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint hanging on the actual rockface.
It was the subject of the Oscar-nominated 2000 documentary The Man on Lincoln’s Nose, which was the intended title for Hitchcock’s film. The documentary’s title was also a reference to Boyle himself and his experiences at the famous site in South Dakota, where the heads of Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt are carved out of the granite.
Boyle worked with Hitchcock again on The Birds (1963), in which the human characters come under attack in their own homes and even in a phone box, and Marnie (1964), with its unashamed use of a painted dockland backdrop when Sean Connery forces his repressed wife, Tippi Hedren, to return to her childhood home and confront buried childhood traumas.
Other films on which he worked included the original version of Cape Fear (1962), In Cold Blood (1967), the original Steve McQueen version of The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), the Goldie Hawn comedy Private Benjamin (1980) and Dragnet (1987).
He was married to the blacklisted screenwriter Bess Taffel, who latterly worked in television and died in 2000. He is survived by two daughters.
Film production designer;
Born October 10, 1909;
Died August 1, 2010.
