John Mollo: Costume designer who brought Star Wars to life

His passion for military uniforms and the cinema found expression in films such as ‘Gandhi’ and ‘Alien’, and most famously in characters such as Darth Vader and R2-D2

In 1978 Mollo picked up an Oscar after delivering on George Lucas’s request for costumes that were distinctive but went ‘unnoticed’ (Getty)

In 1937 John Mollo, who has died aged 86, went to a screening of Clive of India, the riotous 1935 American film set in the British Raj. Mollo was transfixed. As soon as he got home he rushed to draw a costume design – his very first. “I came out of the cinema knowing that was what I wanted to do when I grew up,” he later wrote. Mollo was just six years old.

The experience seemed to wed his twin passions – military uniforms and cinema – for he went on to become one of the leading costume designers of the late 20th century, creating memorable outfits for films including Ridley Scott’s Alien and Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi.

But his most notable costume creations were his earliest – for the original Star Wars, in 1977, and its sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, three years later. His costumes injected the space fantasy with an authenticity that captured the imagination of a generation of cinemagoers. They remain some of the most recognisable, and loved, film costumes ever made.

Having never previously worked as a costume designer, Mollo might already have found the task at hand daunting. But working on this particular film, by a young director with only tentative studio support, was especially strenuous: Mollo had to make do on a budget of $90,000, and had just 14 weeks to prepare the material for shooting. Working on a piece of science fiction in the mid-1970s, a time when the dominant genre was gritty contemporary realism, further raised the pressure: for the film to be successful, audiences had to be drawn in to a wholly foreign world by means of convincing special effects, and costumes. That actors playing characters as central to the plot as Darth Vader, Chewbacca or R2-D2 were to be covered head to toe in Mollo’s creations made his work that much more important.

As for Lucas, he wanted the costumes to be at once highly original – to match the unique story – and completely inconspicuous – so as not to detract from it. “You’ve got a very difficult job here,” he told Mollo the first time they met. “I don’t want anyone to notice the costumes.”

Mollo worked from the sketches drawn up by Ralph McQuarrie, a former technical illustrator with Boeing. He produced some of the earliest renderings of Lucas’s vision. Mollo perfected McQuarrie’s designs and created some of his own from scratch.

He used his encyclopaedic knowledge of military gear to deliver Lucas’s vision of imperial officers, dressed in crisp, dark uniforms reminiscent of fascist soldiers, confronting a ragtag rebel force visually inspired by the Wild West and the US marines in Vietnam. But Mollo also made sure that the costumes looked functional and lived-in, rather than purely symbolic. Mollo won an Oscar for his work on the first Star Wars film, A New Hope. Flanked on stage by models dressed as Darth Vader, Princess Leia and stormtroopers as he delivered his acceptance speech, summing up his work as “really not so much costumes as a bit of plumbing and general automobile engineering”.

He was born in London to Russian émigré Eugene Simonovitch Mollo and his English wife Ella Clara Mollo, née Cockell. Ella was an artist, while Eugene, a keen collector of military badges and the author of a book about Russian military swords, had his own civil engineering company. The couple had two other sons. Mollo was educated at Charterhouse and the Farnham School of Art in Surrey, before doing his military service in Hong Kong.

Sharing with his father and brothers a love of military history, John Mollo wrote, illustrated and edited books about military uniforms including Military Fashion charting uniforms from the 17th Century to the First World War.

In 1968 his brother Andrew, who worked in film, got him a job on Tony Richardson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade as a technical adviser. Mollo supervised the creation of 3,000 military uniforms. Already then he displayed immense attention to detail, and his nagging over minor points sometimes tested the director’s patience. “If you want to make your own boring and accurate film,” Richardson once told him, “you can do it when I have finished mine.”

Mollo proceeded to advise on several other pictures in the early 1970s, including on Stanley Kubrick’s epic period drama Barry Lyndon.

Around that time, George Lucas was looking for a designer with a keen sense of military uniforms to outfit his Star Wars armies. Mollo had never been a costume designer per se, only an adviser, but his expertise fit the bill. Asked whether he would take the job, Mollo simply said: “Yes, why not.”

When he started work on A New Hope in late 1975, he had never seen a science-fiction film. But the director’s early notes reassured him: Lucas did not want the costumes to look too “spacey”.

As for the actual task of designing and building the costumes, Mollo learned to improvise. Luke Skywalker’s outfit he composed from bleached Levis jeans, suede Chelsea boots and a Japanese-style robe, while Darth Vader’s mask combined a German gas mask and helmet.

When production on The Empire Strikes Back neared, many of Mollo’s close peers and family members pressed him to return to more “serious” endeavours – that is, historical dramas. But Mollo was eager to resume work on Star Wars. He did not, however, work on the third instalment of the original trilogy – Return of the Jedi – though his legacy was strongly felt in that film’s costumes team. As his successor on the job put it, “I was really conscious every step of the way that I was working in John Mollo’s language.”

Between the two Star Wars films, Mollo designed costumes for Alien. Crucial to the tension in the film is the contrast between the laid-back atmosphere on board the Nostromo space ship in early scenes, and the monstrous carnage that later unfolds. The casual clothes heighten that contrast. As the American playwright David Mamet later put it, “all future space explorers must adopt the casual Hawaiian-shirt ambiance of costume designer John Mollo's clothes in Alien”.

Mollo continued to work in film after Star Wars and Alien, returning to historical dramas with such productions as Gandhi in 1982, Revolution in 1985 and The Three Musketeers in 1993. In parallel, he published numerous books on military uniforms, which he felt were an understudied area of history that were only just beginning to attract the scholarly attention they deserved.

He is survived by his wife Louise Mollo, née Pongracs, and their son Thomas. An earlier marriage, to Ann Farquharson, ended in divorce.

An unassuming, moustachioed Englishman, Mollo seemed to never quite understand the fans’ devotion to his work on Star Wars. In later life he started attending functions dedicated to the films and was amazed at how many fans would attend, including from the younger generations. Reflecting back in a recent interview on his work for Lucas, Mollo said, with typical restraint: “I think on the whole I did a good job.”

John Mollo, costume designer and military historian, born 18 March 1931, died 25 October 2017