Edith Head - The Costume Designer With A Difference

Edith Head, the prominent costume designer of Hollywood had worked on 1,131 motion pictures.During her long career,she was nominated for  35 Academy Awards and won  8 Oscars , the maximum number of Oscars for any woman in history.

She was known for her modest working style, and in contrast to many of her male contemporaries typically consulted extensively with the female stars she worked with. Due to this, she was a favorite designer for many of the leading female stars of the 1940s and 1950s including Ginger Rogers, Shirley MacLaine, Anne Baxter, Barbara Stanwyck, Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor.

Edith Head was responsible for some of the popular Hollywood fashion images of her day, with her costumes being worn by the most stunning and famous actresses in films. Head's influence on world fashion was across-the-board, especially in the 1950s when she started appearing on Art Linkletter's television program and writing books on fashion.

In addition to her film career, she designed Vogue sewing patterns; traveled across the country staging Hollywood fashion shows ; wrote magazine and newspaper columns; wrote two books, including The Dress Doctor (with Joan Kesner Ardmore, 1959) and How to Dress for Success (with Joe Hyams,1967) and audio taped hours of interviews in preparation for her autobiography, Edith Head’s Hollywood, co-authored by Paddy Calistro, and published posthumously in 1983.

Edith Head expired in 1981 of a progressive and rare blood disease, myeloid metaplasia, two weeks after completing work on her last film, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid.

One of her quotations : You can lead a horse to water and you can even make it drink, but you can't make actresses wear what they don't want to wear.