Broadway costumer born in Youngstown dies at 97

By Valerie J. NELSON

Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES

Noel Taylor, an award-winning costume designer whose career spanned seven decades and started almost by accident after artist Marc Chagall sought his help, has died. He was 97.

Taylor, a longtime resident of West Hollywood, died of natural causes Thursday at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center, said Patrick Munoz, executor of his estate.

He was born Harold Alexander Taylor Jr. on Jan. 17, 1913, in Youngstown, the second of two sons of a stockbroker and his wife, a painter. At 7, he moved with his family to Paris for two years and acquired “Noel” as a childhood nickname. His family moved to Connecticut when he was 17.

Nominated four times for an Emmy Award, Taylor won in 1978 for costume design for the PBS drama “Actor: The Paul Muni Story.” He also had designed for more than 70 Broadway plays, many local stage productions and nearly 30 television shows and films.

At 16, Taylor dropped out of high school to work in the theater and at 22 was starring on Broadway in “Cross Ruff,” a play he also wrote.

Trained as a painter, Taylor turned toward costume design when Chagall asked him to help paint costumes in the late 1940s for a New York City Ballet production of “The Firebird.”

“When I’m doing a costume, I don’t think of it as a piece of wardrobe,” Taylor told the Los Angeles Times in 1980. “I think of it as a painting.”

On Broadway, he was prominent and prolific until his early 80s. In the 1950s, he laboriously dyed fabric for “The Teahouse of the August Moon” and did costumes for “Dial ‘M’ for Murder,” and the early 1960s plays “The Night of the Iguana” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

He was nominated for Emmys for the 1991 Civil War miniseries “Ironclads,” the 1982 special “Eleanor, First Lady of the World” and the 1965 Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation of “The Magnificent Yankee.”

“He was a brilliantly talented designer,” said Rachael Stanley, interim director of the Costume Designers Guild, which gave Taylor a lifetime achievement award in 2004. “His sketches are really pieces of art in and of themselves. One he did of Katharine Hepburn is on my wall.”

Taylor had two major life partners, George Sullivan and artist Adnan Karabay. He is survived by a nephew.