April Ferry, Costume Designer on ‘Big Trouble in Little China,' ‘Rome' and ‘Game of Thrones,' Dies at 91
April Ferry, Costume Designer on ‘Big Trouble in Little China,’ ‘Rome’ and ‘Game of Thrones,’ Dies at 91
April Ferry, the Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning costume designer known for her work on Big Trouble in Little China, Maverick, Rome and Game of Thrones, died Thursday, the Costume Designers Guild announced. She was 91.
Ferry, who graduated to costume designer on Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill (1983), collaborated with John Hughes on Planes, Trains & Automobiles (1987), She’s Having a Baby (1988) and Flubber (1997) and with Jonathan Mostow on U-571 (2000), Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003) and Surrogates (2009).
She received her Academy Award nom for Richard Donner’s reimagining of Maverick (1994) – she lost out to Lizzy Gardiner and Tim Chappel of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert on Oscar night – and won her Emmy in 2006 for HBO’s Rome.
Her résumé also included Made in Heaven (1987), Child’s Play (1988), The Babe (1992), Donner’s Radio Flyer (1992), Unlawful Entry (1992), Free Willy (1993), Beethoven’s 2nd (1993), Little Giants (1994), Donnie Darko (2001), Elysium (2013), RoboCop (2014) and Jurassic World (2015).
In 2014, she was presented with a career achievement award from the CDG.
Ferry’s opulent costumes were on full display on the John Carpenter-directed cult classic Big Trouble in Little China (1986), starring Kurt Russell. She especially enjoyed designing the armor and hand-woven hats for Rain, Thunder and Lightning, the three warriors known as The Storms, she said in a 2016 interview for the CDG.
She joined HBO’s Game of Thrones in 2015 for its sixth season after the show’s original costume designer, Michele Clapton, exited for what proved to be just a few episodes. The pair shared a guild award for their work that year.
April Cecilia Gaskins was born on Oct. 31, 1932, in North Carolina’s Beaufort County. She appeared as a dancer in the original 1953-55 Broadway production of Charles Lederer’s Kismet, winner of the Tony for best musical.
“I loved how the costume designer [worked] when they fitted me, and I [realized] that would be a great thing to do,” she said in a 2016 interview. “[After all], and I can’t dance my whole life.”
She concentrated on a career in costumes after she divorced in 1968 and worked as a wardrobe mistress on The Dean Martin Show in the early 1970s. She broke into the movies with jobs on the 1979 films The Rose and The Jerk.
Ferry also did costume work for such other films as One From the Heart (1981), Wim Wenders’ 1920s-set Hammett (1982) and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982) before serving as the costume designer on The Big Chill.
She was in charge of Cher’s costumes in Mask (1985), and four years later, she landed her first Emmy nom for her work on the ABC period telefilm My Name Is Bill W. She also handled six Rockford Files telefilms from 1994-96.
For Rome, set in the 1st century BC, Ferry received Emmy noms for outstanding costumes for a series after both seasons of the 2005-07 series. In a 2006 interview, she noted her team “made everything from scratch.”
“I have a marvelous metal worker and, at the very beginning, he made one helmet with his hands and a piece of brass and a hammer,” she said. “I took it to India and had them make 350 copies.”
She won two CDG awards for the series.
Survivors include her children, Steve, David and Katy.
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