Rosanna Norton, who was Oscar-nominated for costume design for 1982’s “Tron” and designed Sissy Spacek’s iconic prom dress for “Carrie,” died of cancer May 7 in Los Angeles. She was 80.
Her early costume design credits include Terrence Malick’s “Badlands” and Brian de Palma’s “Carrie” and “Phantom of the Paradise.”
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“We had no money,” she recalled in a video interview about “Carrie.” She found many of the prom outfits in a store in the Valley that was going out of business, she said. But she had Carrie’s simple pale pink satin dress custom-made by a seamstress after changing the color from the original red in the book to create a more striking contrast with the blood that is splashed on Spacek.
“At the time, prom dresses and bridesmaid dresses and things were very fussy. They had all these ruffles and detail and I wanted to do….a bias cut dress and I wanted it to be really simple and look as if she could have made it herself,” she told Birth Movies Death. “It didn’t have a lot of ruffles or detail work. It’s sort of a classic 1930s bias cut dress. I wanted her to look different from everybody else but beautiful at the same time, and all the other girls, they looked like teenage girls wearing these sort of ruffly, fancy, gathered dresses.”
Norton was a lifelong Angeleno and while attending UCLA, she met her husband-to-be Bill Norton. Norton was the writer and director of “Cisco Pike,” for which she served as production designer and costume designer.
She joined the Costume Directors Guild in 1975 and went on to mentor many members of the guild.
Norton explained her luck in connecting with directors in a statement from the guild, saying, “I would have been a painter, but was really lucky to get on some really good pictures through my friendships with directors Brian de Palma and Terry Malick.”
Among her more than 50 film credits, highlights included “The Stuntman” and “Tron,” for which she shared credit with Elois Jenssen and was nominated for an Academy Award in 1983, and the live action version of “The Flintstones.”
Norton’s credits also include “The Brady Bunch Movie,” “Innerspace,” “Airplane!” and “Airplane II,” “RoboCop 2,” “Casper,” “The Patriot” and “The ‘Burbs.”
After retiring as a costume designer, Norton returned to painting.
She is survived by two children and five grandchildren.
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