William Travilla - Life and Work

Life and Work

William Travilla was born on March 22, 1920 in Los Angeles, California and first began to work in Hollywood in 1941. After work on several B movies, he worked his way upward through the studio until he earned an Oscar in 1949 for the Errol Flynn swashbuckler Adventures of Don Juan, and in 1951 designed the costumes in the now classic sci-fi tale of morality The Day the Earth Stood Still. He then worked mainly at Twentieth Century-Fox, where his credits included Elia Kazan's Viva Zapata!.

By 1952, he was close friends with Marilyn Monroe and created the costumes for Don't Bother to Knock and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. He went on to design the costumes for several more of her films. Travilla created one of the most famous costumes in all of film – the pleated ivory cocktail dress Monroe wore in the 1955 film The Seven Year Itch. Monroe is wearing it while standing on a New York subway ventilation grate; the dress rises up around her as a train passes below ground. Photographs of this scene have become synonymous with Monroe herself. The iconic dress, which was later purchased by actress Debbie Reynolds, was sold for $4,600,000 (USD) during a 2011 auction. Monroe once wrote to Travilla, "Billy Dear, please dress me forever. I love you, Marilyn."

Travilla was also nominated for the Academy Award for How to Marry a Millionaire in 1953, There's No Business Like Show Business in 1954 and The Stripper in 1963.

In the late 1970s, Travilla began working mainly in television. One of his most widely seen latter-day projects was the TV mini-series The Thorn Birds in 1983. Travilla was nominated for Emmy awards seven times for his work on television. In 1980, he won the Emmy for "Outstanding Costume Design for a Limited Series or a Special" forThe Scarlett O'Hara War, and in 1985 he won the "Outstanding Costume Design for a Series" Emmy for his work on the television show Knots Landing.

Travilla died on November 2, 1990 in Los Angeles, California, of lung cancer.

An exhibition of the personal collection of William Travilla began a world tour in 2008. The show began in England, then came to Los Angeles and in 2009 to Palm Springs, California. The collection includes gowns worn by Marilyn Monroe, Dionne Warwick, Whitney Houston, Faye Dunaway, Judy Garland, Sharon Tate, Jane Russell, Betty Grable, Lana Turner, Diahann Carroll, Susan Hayward, Loretta Young, Joanne Woodward, Barbara Stanwyck and many other women in film and television, as well as his Oscar, patterns, sewing room artifacts and numerous original watercolor renderings of his costume designs.