John Box

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This article is about the Britich film designer. For the U.S. congressman from Texas, see John C. Box.

John Allan Hyatt Box OBE, (January 27, 1920—March 7, 2005), was a British film production designer and art director. During his career he won the Academy Award for Best Art Direction on four occasions and won its BAFTA equivalent three times, making him the most decorated member of his profession of all time. Throughout his career he earned a reputation for recreating exotic locations in rather more mundane surrounding, for example he once created a walled Chinese city in Snowdonia.

Box was born in London, briefly attending Highgate School but, due to his father's job as a civil engineer, spent most of his childhood in Sri Lanka, then the British colony of Ceylon. After studying architecture at North London Polytechnic he served in the Royal Armoured Corps during World War II.

After the war Box served his apprenticeship an assistant to the art director Carmen Dillon, herself an Oscar winner. During this period he worked on several British films, including Anthony Asquith's 1951 adaptation of The Browning Version. Box’s first films as an art director were low budget affairs, the first being the 1956 science fiction B-movie The Gamma People. His first big break came when Mark Robson asked him to work on the period film The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, which starred Ingrid Bergman. After this Box worked on both Richard Quine’s The World of Suzie Wong and Carol Reed's adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel Our Man in Havana, both of which were released in 1960.

However, it was his role as the production designer of Lawrence of Arabia that really made his name, as well as winning him his first Oscar. Incidentally Box only got the job working on this film after John Bryan, a man for whom he had a great respect, fell ill. He designed Of Human Bondage in 1964 and worked with David Lean again on the 1965 adaptation of Doctor Zhivago, and once again he won an Oscar for his lavish set designs.

The following year Box won his first BAFTA award, for his reproduction of Tudor London in Fred Zinnemann's version of A Man for All Seasons. His next production also saw him recreate London, but this time that of the Victorian era for the musical Oliver!. He won an Oscar for Oliver!, a feat he repeated in his next film three years later. Nicholas and Alexandra, which provided Box with his final Academy Award, saw him reproduce in great detail the bipolar world of pre-revolution Russia.

In 1972, Box worked on Travels with My Aunt, which earned him another Oscar nomination. He won a BAFTA in 1974 for his role on Jack Clayton’s version of The Great Gatsby, and won the award again the following year for Rollerball.

Box's next two projects were 1977's Sorcerer and The Keep from 1983, both of which proved to be expensive flops. He reunited with David Lean in 1984 for the film A Passage to India, for which Box received his final Oscar and BAFTA nominations. He retired after this film, but returned in the mid-90s to work on an adaptation of Black Beauty and First Knight, which proved to be both his first foray into computer assisted set design and his final film. He was awarded the OBE in 1998.