Tony Walton

Anthony John Walton (24 October 1934 – 2 March 2022) was a British costume designer and set designer.^[1] He won three Tony Awards, an Academy Award, and a Emmy Award. He received three Tony Awards for Pippin (1973), House of Blue Leaves (1986), and Guys and Dolls (1992). For his work in movies, he won an Academy Award for Best Production Design, for All That Jazz (1979), and nominations for Mary Poppins (1964), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), and The Wiz (1978).^[2] For his work in television, he won an Primetime Emmy Award, for Death of a Salesman (1985).^[3]

Walton was born in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, England, on 24 October 1934. His father, Lancelot, was an orthopedic surgeon and his mother, Hilda, was a homemaker.^[4][3][5] He fell in love with the theatre as child when on a family trip to a pantomime.^[5] At the age of 12, he met Julie Andrews after he had watched her in a performance of Humpty Dumpty in the West End. She was 11 at the time. He found her number in the telephone book and asked for her address so he could send her some pictures. The two became good friends from this point.^[2]

Walton attended Radley College in Oxford where he studied Greek and Latin. Here he put on some ambitious marionette shows, one of which was attended by the English artist John Piper. He came to find Walton at the end of the show, and told him he should go into stage design.^[2] Walton followed his advice and studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. He spent two years of mandatory military training with the Royal Air Force,^[6] as a trainee pilot in Ontario, Canada.^[4] After completing his National Service, he headed to New York to join Julie Andrews, who was making a name for herself on Broadway.^[2]

He began his career in 1957 with the stage design for Noël Coward's off-Broadway production of Conversation Piece.^[3] Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, he designed for the New York and London stage.

Walton entered the motion pictures business through Walt Disney, after Disney met him back stage after a performance of Camelot. Julie Andrews, who was now his fiancé, was already in line to play the part of Mary Poppins in the classic film. Disney offered to look at his portfolio and later ended up hiring Walton as a costume designer, set designer, and visual consultant for Mary Poppins. He was not allowed to make any reference to the famous illustrations that Mary Shephard had done for the original book in 1934, as the rights to the story did not include this. The Sherman brothers, who were working on the songs for the movie, suggested that he transposed the era of the story from the 1930s to the Edwardian era, to ensure he avoided any accidental replications.^[5] He made the set realistic, paying attention to detail, as he was always annoyed by sets that didn't look real. He also alluded to Mary Poppins' "secret life", by making her clothes grey or black on the outside, but with brightly coloured linings and flashes of crimson.^[5] For this he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Costume Design (Color).

Walton continued to work in the film industry as a costume designer and set designer working on films such as A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966), The Boy Friend (1971), and Equus (1977). Walton received further Academy Award nominations for his work on Murder on the Orient Express (1974), and The Wiz (1978). He won his only Academy Award for his work as an Art Director on Bob Fosse's musical film All That Jazz (1979).^[2]

In 1983, Diana Ross, the star of the film The Wiz, chose Walton to design the stage set for her 1983 Central Park concert, "For One & For All". Broadcast worldwide on the Showtime cable network, the concert special, over the course of two days, featured an on-site audience of over 1,200,000 on the park's Great Lawn.

In 1989, the American Museum of the Moving Image showcased over 30 years of his work for films, television, and theatre in an exhibit entitled: Tony Walton: Designing for Stage and Screen, including drawings, models and photographs from his early plays including the Regency-style Conversation Piece from 1957 and "his evocation of a London street" for the 1964 film Mary Poppins.^[7]

In December 2005, for their annual birthday celebration to 'The Master', The Noël Coward Society invited Walton as the guest celebrity to lay flowers in front of Coward's statue at New York's Gershwin Theatre, thereby commemorating the 106th birthday of Sir Noël.

Inspiration for Disney's Winnie the Pooh

Walton gave the Sherman Brothers the insight and inspiration for the Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree songs as is explained in the Sherman Brothers' joint autobiography, Walt's Time:

Walt (Disney) said 'Read the Pooh stories and let me know what you think.' We tried, but the stories just weren't coming through to us. At that time designer Tony Walton was working on Poppins. He was English-born, and he was about our age, so we asked him to give us some insight on the Pooh character. His eyes lit up. 'Winnie the Pooh?', he said. 'I love Winnie the Pooh! Of course I'll help you!' Three hours later, he was still talking about Pooh, inspiring us no end. He explained how he had been a chubby little boy, and had felt very insecure. But Winnie the Pooh was his buddy, because Pooh was pudgy and proud of it. Pooh was probably the only character in the world who exercised to gain weight! Pooh was a wonderful, lovable friend who would never let you down or turn his back on you. Soon, we started to fall in love with Pooh ourselves. Our songs for Winnie the Pooh were truly a love affair, thanks to A.A. Milne and to Tony Walton.^[8]

Walton married his childhood sweetheart Julie Andrews in 1959, and together they had a daughter, Emma Walton Hamilton.^[9] Walton said that he fell in love with Andrews when they were children and he saw her playing the egg in a theatre production of Humpty Dumpty. They divorced in 1968 but remained close friends. Walton, Andrews, and their daughter worked together professionally several times, with Walton illustrating several children's books written by Andrews and their daughter.

Walton married Gen LeRoy in 1991. Walton died from complications of a stroke at his apartment in New York City on 2 March 2022, at the age of 87.^[10]

Walton later diversified into directing, with productions of:

• Orson Welles' Moby Dick—Rehearsed, 2005
• Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, 1996
• Noël Coward In Two Keys, 1996
• George Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara, 1997
• Missing Footage, 1999
• Ooops! The Big Apple Circus Stage Show, 1999
• Where's Charley?, 2004
• After the Ball, 2004
• Busker Alley, 2006

• Tony Walton at IMDb
• Tony Walton at the Internet Broadway Database
• Tony Walton at the Internet Off-Broadway Database
• Yahoo! Movies profile of Tony Walton
• A Tale of Two Cities
• Profile for A Tale of Two Cities
• Tony Walton costume design reproductions for The Wiz, 1978., held by the Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts