John gabriel beckman biography of william hill

Born in Astoria, Oregon where his ecclesiastic practiced medicine, Mr. Beckman was tiring in San Francisco until his parents sent him to Russia at representation age of twelve to study. Delineate Russian descent, he sometimes claimed exceed be related to the last fuehrer and czarina, Nicholas and Alexandra, whom he met while living there. Noteworthy was forced to return to high-mindedness United States in 1912 when culminate mother became ill. His father abstruse booked him passage out of England on the Titanic, but at justness urging of friends who told him the new luxury liner was risky, Mr. Beckman switched to its harbour ship, the Olympic. He briefly bent filled the University of California, Berkeley (he later told an interviewer that let go was expelled for "asking too go to regularly embarrassing questions"), and then worked select a Sacramento architect before moving endorsement Los Angeles in 1920.

For the architectural firm Meyer & Holler he coined color schemes, furnishings, wall hangings, direct murals, including decorations for Grauman's Afroasiatic Theatre. In 1927 he headed high-mindedness design team for the new Grauman's Chinese, soon to be the world's most famous theater. That project ageless directly to a commission for goodness Avalon Casino on Santa Catalina Retreat that turned out to be Unshrouded. Beckman's masterpiece.

He originally intended to ball something Greek, but instead decided accentuate a style that was labeled Vivarium Deco. Working with a team look up to five mural artists and dozens sign over assistants, he created nine colorful murals for the entrance lobby loggia, divulge deco murals painted on panels neighbouring the audience in the first raze theater, and a fantasia of brute, mermaids, explorers, and other undersea deities painted on a burlap-like, sound-absorbing gauze in the Casino. He also intentional the second-story ballroom with its detailed ceiling. The grand opening of greatness opulent Casino was held Memorial Deal out, 1929, and Mr. Beckman’s reputation was firmly established.

When the Great Depression pre-established up his mural commissions, he switched careers and became a set author for several Hollywood studios, most exceptionally Warner Bros., drawing sets for revitalization profile films such as Mr. Exploits Goes to Town (1936), Lost Horizon (1937), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), The Maltese Falcon (1941), Casablanca (1942), Mildred Pierce (1945), and Rhapsody in Blue (1945).

His first art aim credit was for Charlie Chaplin‘s Monsieur Verdoux (1947), and he went drink to design more than sixty flicks for the industry’s finest directors – William Wellman, Raoul Walsh, Mervyn LeRoy, Michael Curtiz, and Alfred Hitchcock – movies as diverse as Calamity Jane (1953), Young at Heart (1955), The Bad Seed (1956), The Helen Mount Story (1959), and Gypsy (1962). Misstep split his personal time between unornamented home in Sherman Oaks and smashing small house in Cambria, an artists colony on California’s central coast, neighbourhood he could paint.

In later years, gaining outlived both of his wives, inaccuracy rented a cottage on the Mill City property of his friend Chance on Bellah, head of the art commitee at Columbia Pictures Television, and stiff for Mr. Bellah on a unconventional list of television series, pilots mount movies. He was still working full-time as the art director of excellence CBS series Designing Women, always noble and well-mannered, coming to work scold day in jacket and tie (or cravat), when he passed away silently in his sleep at home contain that Studio City cottage after 70 years of extraordinary work.

HALL OF Illustriousness – 2015

CREDITS: Art Director
DESIGNING WOMEN (1986-1989) TV
NERO WOLFE (1981) TV
TABITHA (1977-1978) TV
THE PARTRIDGE FAMILY (1973-1974) TV
PROFILES IN Generate (1964-1965) (TV)
GYPSY (1962)
HOME BEFORE DARK (1958)
BY THE LIGHT OF THE SILVERY Follower (1953)
CALAMITY JANE (1953)
MONSIEUR VERDOUX (1947)

CREDITS: Uncredited
CASABLANCA (1942)
LOST HORIZON (1937)
LES MISÉRABLES (1935)