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Draft:Wendy Dickson

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Australian film and theatrical designer, born in Broken Hill in 1932, died in Balmain, Sydney, 2024. Her family moved to Sydney in 1938, and she attended Sydney Girl's High. She then attended the Julian Ashton Art School, and East Sydney Technical College. Moving to London in the early 1950s, Wendy studied theatrical design at the Central School of Art and Design.

Back in Australia, she was resident designer with the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust, starting with the ground-breaking 1959 production of Long Day’s Journey into Night. Wendy designed sets and costumes for 18 assorted Trust productions, ranging from ballet and theatre to grand opera. She was one of three Australians who participated in the 1967 inaugural International Exhibition of Stage Design and Theatre Architecture, since known as the Prague Quadrennial. She exhibited designs from The Flying Dutchman and The Royal Hunt of the Sun.

She designed sets and costumes for the historically significant 1962 Tasker production of The Ham Funeral and the 1964 Night on Bald Mountain, both by Patrick White. Wendy’s correspondence with Patrick White has been on exhibition at the State Library of NSW. She sometimes returned to London, and she designed the costumes for the 1972 Charlton Heston version of Antony and Cleopatra. Her first Australian film as production designer was The World of The Seekers in 1968. She married TV and film director Ken Hannam in 1968.

Partly through her close friend Patricia Lovell, Wendy worked on a number of important Australian films, including Break of Day in 1976. She was production designer for films The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978), Bliss (1985), Evil Angels (1988), and also the 1976 TV series Luke’s Kingdom. In North America, Evil Angels was titled A Cry in the Dark.

References

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IMDb entry for Wendy Dickson

The Bulletin., v.099, no.5053, 1977-04-16, p.43, via Trove

AusStage entry for Wendy Dickson

Prague Quadrennial: International Exhibition of Stage Design and Theatre Architecture, 1967 Catalogue

'Sailing ship on stage', The Age, 27 June 1967, p.15