Lila De Nobili

Lila De Nobili (September 3, 1916 – February 19, 2002) was an Italian stage designer, costume designer, and fashion illustrator. She was noted for her collaborations with leading stage and opera directors such as Luchino Visconti and Franco Zeffirelli, as well as her early work on fashion illustration at Vogue magazine.

Personal

De Nobili was born in Castagnola (Lugano). Her father was from an old Italian family and her mother was from a Jewish Hungarian family. Her uncle was the celebrated painter and academy-award-winning costume designer Marcel Vertès. Vertes painted Lila as a child.

In the 1930s, she studied with the artist Ferruccio Ferrazzi at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. One of her own pupils was the costume designer and director, Christine Edzard of Sands Films in Rotherhithe, London with whom she had a lifelong friendship and collaboration.

She settled in Paris in 1943, and this would be her home for most of her life on the rue de Verneuil and on the Quai Voltaire, where she lived with her mother, up until her death in 2002.

Career

Illustration

In Paris, De Nobili began doing illustrations of the haute couture collections for various magazines, especially Vogue.

Theater

Lila De Nobili created stage and costume designs for many of the most important productions of her time, including Angel Pavement (1947), Le voleur d'enfants (1948), A Streetcar Named Desire (1949), La Petite Lili (1951), Anna Karenine (1951), Gigi (1951), Cyrano de Bergerac (1953), The Country Girl (1954), The Crucible (1954), La Plume de Ma Tante (1958), L'Arlésienne (1958), Carmen (1959) and The Aspern Papers (1961).

She went on to work on numerous collaborations with Luchino Visconti, working with him at the La Scala opera house in Milan, and Franco Zeffirelli, as well as working with Peter Hall. She was introduced to Hall by his then wife, Leslie Caron, who knew her from the ballet in Paris. De Nobili designed seven Shakespeare comedies and late plays for Hall at the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon and the Aldwych Theatre, London, in the late 1950s and 1960s.[1][2][3][4]

She died in Paris, aged 95. Franco Zeffirelli said, when he heard of her death; "She was the greatest scene and costume designer of the 20th Century, the teacher of us all. Every time I design an opera I think of her."[5] Her portrait done by David Hockney in oil pastel in 1973 is sometimes mis-titled as 'Lila Nobilis'.[6]

References

  1. ↑ "Lila de Nobili". The Telegraph. 5 March 2002.
  2. ↑ "Obituary: Lila de Nobili". The Guardian.
  3. ↑ "Midsummer Night's Dream, A". British Universities Film and Video Council.
  4. ↑ "Lila de Nobili". Theatricalia.
  5. ↑ "Friends of La Scala celebrates Lila de Nobili". Gramilano. Dec 2014.
  6. ↑ "Books: Lila De Nobili, Theatre, Dance, Cinema". Vittoria Crespi Mobio.
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