The production designer Terence Marsh, who has died aged 86, was asked in 2011 what precisely he had done on Lawrence of Arabia. “Oh – I built Aqaba,” he said. And he had: when a replica of the Red Sea port was required for the sequence in David Lean’s 1962 epic in which the Turkish garrison is attacked, Marsh and his colleague and mentor John Box constructed one behind the beach of Playa del Algarrobico, near Almeria in Spain. It was the first of many instances in which he worked resourcefully and imaginatively on a majestic scale.
Marsh and Box went on to win Oscars for their second film with Lean, Doctor Zhivago (1965), for which Marsh helped to find the locations. Spain once again came to the rescue, this time doubling for Russia and earning from the crew the nickname “Moscow on Madrid”. There were more Oscars for the bustling 19th-century London that Box and Marsh created for Carol Reed’s Oliver! (1968). Marsh’s notable later work included two ambitious prison movies with spiritual overtones: The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and The Green Mile (1999), both directed by Frank Darabont from stories by Stephen King.
Darabont, who called Marsh a “genius”, expressed disappointment that The Shawshank Redemption’s seven Oscar nominations did not include one for production design. “I think most people just assumed that we walked into an empty prison and that’s exactly what it looked like, but it’s not the case. Terry and his crew built this set from the floor up. It’s a four-tier, 200-cell block and every little scrap of it is fabricated, every frayed cord, the years of chipping paint on the walls, it’s all created by them.
“Look at the detail, the fact that every door was tied into an air pressure system so we could open or close 200 doors at once. If I walked you into this set blindfolded you would think you’re on a real cell block, it was that convincing to the eye.”
According to Darabont, King said that seeing the set for the first time was “like taking a walk inside the country of his own imagination”.
Marsh used what he had learned there to even greater effect on The Green Mile, where he designed what Darabont called a “Chinese puzzle” of a set, in which the walls of cells could be slid in and out of place at will to avoid laborious changes.
Marsh was born in London, the son of Sheila (nee Mullen), who sometimes worked as an extra, and George Marsh, a print worker. As a child, Terence earned additional income for the family by sitting as a model for knitting patterns. He was educated at Hornsey College of Art and studied architectural drawing at Willesden College of Technology. After completing national service in the RAF, he worked for six years as a draughtsman for Rank Films at Pinewood Studios on pictures including The Prince and the Showgirl (1957), starring Laurence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe.
From there, he was chosen as assistant art director on Lawrence of Arabia, where he was also called upon to double for Peter O’Toole in the early scenes when the actor declined to ride one of the Brough Superior motorbikes cherished by TE Lawrence. Though Marsh found Lean “rather cold”, the production cemented his friendship with Box, who appointed him assistant art director on his next film, Of Human Bondage (1964). Their other collaborations were The Wild Affair (1965) and A Man For All Seasons (1966). Marsh also designed The Looking Glass War (1970), which Box produced.
Marsh received Academy Award nominations for Mary, Queen of Scots (1971) and Scrooge (1970), as well as designing the romantic comedy A Touch of Class (1973) and two films for Richard Lester: the thriller Juggernaut (1974) and the swashbuckling romp Royal Flash (1975). He moved to Los Angeles in 1975 and struck up a friendship over tennis with Gene Wilder and Mel Brooks, and later worked with both.
For Wilder, he designed the period comedy The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother (1975), The World’s Greatest Lover (1977) and Haunted Honeymoon (1986), which he also co-wrote, while for Brooks he designed a remake of Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1983) and the science-fiction spoof Spaceballs (1987), appearing in cameo roles in both. He worked again with Lester as production designer, co-writer and co-producer of the comedy Finders Keepers (1984).
Among his other credits were the thrillers The Hunt for Red October (1990), Basic Instinct (1992), and Clear and Present Danger (1994). He bowed out with the action comedy Rush Hour 2 (2001). “It was a completely different world than Lean and Carol Reed,” he noted. “It was joining a lot of jolly schoolboys having fun. They wrote the script as we went along, which was not good for the art department.”
In 2010 he received the Art Directors Guild lifetime achievement award.
He is survived by his wife, Sandra (nee Rogers), whom he married in 1975; and by three of four daughters – Georgina, Rebecca and Jocelyn – from his first marriage, to Lorna (nee Wrapson), which ended in divorce. His eldest daughter, Linda, predeceased him.
• Terence Marsh, production designer, born 14 November 1931; died 9 January 2018
