The set decorator Ian Whittaker, who has died of prostate cancer aged 94, won an Oscar (shared with his long-time collaborator, the production designer Luciana Arrighi) for the 1992 screen version of EM Forster’s Howards End. This was among the best in a string of literary adaptations directed by James Ivory, produced by Ismail Merchant and scripted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Whittaker was in the running for another Oscar for the same team’s film of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1993), though his career was not confined to costume drama. “Council houses, stately homes, spaceships, I’ve done them all,” he said.
His first nomination was for Ridley Scott’s intergalactic horror smash Alien (1979). To build the futuristic interior of the Nostromo spacecraft, where most of the action takes place, he assembled bits and bobs of old washing machines: “We just stuck them on the wall and sprayed them white.”
