Redmond, an illustrator and production designer who helped visualize several Alfred Hitchcock films and worked with Walt Disney to design a private apartment in Disneyland's New Orleans Square, has died. She was 98.
Redmond died of congestive heart failure Feb. 27 at her longtime home in the Hollywood Hills, said her daughter, Lynne Jackson.
In Hollywood, Redmond broke ground in 1938 as the first woman to invade the “heretofore exclusively male field" of motion-picture production design, at David O. Selznick's studio, The Times reported that year. Her male colleagues so resented her, they insisted that Redmond's work space be walled off from theirs, her daughter recalled.
Redmond came to be regarded as one of the most talented illustrators in the industry, according to research by Tania Modleski, a USC English professor who is documenting the contributions women made Hitchcock's films.
Working with Hitchcock and an art director, Redmond would create an illustration that became the basis for communicating to the cameraman and others -- and essentially set the tone of key scenes, Modleski told The Times in an e-mail.
The artist “was masterful at working with light and shadow," Modleski said, “and deserves credit for working with Hitchcock to convey the German Expressionist aesthetic he has been praised for adopting throughout much of his career."
“Casting a Shadow: Creating the Alfred Hitchcock Film," an exhibit staged last year at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills, also documented Redmond's collaboration with Hitchcock. The director was known for presenting himself as an auteur when in reality he was deeply collaborative, the exhibit pointed out.
Redmond's suspense-filled graphite drawings interpreting a sequence in Hitchcock's 1943 film “Shadow of a Doubt" helped transform a sleepy town into a threatening locale, which was essential to the movie's evolution, according to the 2007 book “Casting a Shadow," based on the exhibit.
Hitchcock was “one of her very favorite people to work with," said Redmond's daughter. “She just loved his personality and his taste."
In a film career that started with 1937's “Nothing Sacred" and spanned 20 years, Redmond contributed to seven Hitchcock films, including “Rebecca" (1940), “Rear Window" (1954) and “To Catch a Thief" (1955).
Among the more than 30 films she worked on are such classics as “Gone With the Wind" (1939), “The Best Years of Our Lives" (1946) and “The Ten Commandments" (1956).
In 1964, she joined what is now known as Walt Disney Imagineering and helped envision elements of Disneyland and Disney World.
