Consolata Boyle is an Irish costume designer based in Dublin. She is a frequent collaborator of English director Stephen Frears and has been nominated twice for the Academy Award for Best Costume Design for her work on two of his films: The Queen (2006) and Florence Foster Jenkins (2016).
A graduate of University College Dublin in Archaeology and History, where she was involved in the University society Dramsoc, she trained in costume design at the Abbey Theatre and began her career in the early 1980s. She also did a postgraduate diploma in textiles at West Surrey College of Art & Design (now University for the Creative Arts).
Her many credits include Anne Devlin (1984), December Bride (1991), Into the West (1992), Widows' Peak (1994), Angela's Ashes (1999), Nora (2000), When Brendan Met Trudy (2001), The Iron Lady (2011), Miss Julie (2014) and Testament of Youth (2014). Her collaboration with Stephen Frears began with The Snapper in 1993 and continued with films including Mary Reilly (1996), The Queen (2006), Cheri (2009), Tamara Drewe (2010), Philomena (2013) and Florence Foster Jenkins (2016). Most recently, she designed the costumes for Frears' forthcoming 2017 film Victoria and Abdul, in which Dame Judi Dench will reprise her role as Queen Victoria alongside Ali Fazal as Abdul Karim.
As well as her two Oscar nominations, Boyle has been nominated for several other awards throughout her career as a costume designer and amongst those that she has won are an Emmy Award for the television film The Lion in Winter (2003), a Costume Designers Guild Award for The Queen (2006) and four Irish Film and Television Awards for The Queen (2006), Chéri (2009), The Iron Lady (2011) and Philomena (2013). Had she won the Oscar for which she had been nominated at the 89th Academy Awards (2017), she would have become the fifth Irishwoman to win a competitive Oscar after art director Josie MacAvin, make-up artist Michèle Burke, producer Corinne Marrinan and actress Brenda Fricker. She is married to Donald Taylor Black and they have one child. She lost to American designer Colleen Atwood.
Irish costume designer Consolata Boyle receives Oscar
nomination
Amy Mulvaney
January 24 2017 1:29 PM
Consolata Boyle has landed an Oscar nomination for Best Costume Design.
The Dublin woman was nominated for her work on comedy-drama
Florence Foster Jenkins, starring Meryl Streep.
Consolata has been working on costumes in theatre and film
since the early 1980s and her credits include Angela's Ashes and The Iron Lady.
She won an Emmy in 2004 for her work on The Lion in Winter, and was nominated
for an Oscar in 2007 for Best Achievement in Costume Design for her work on The
Queen.
"My journey in to the film industry was quite
unexpected. I was working in theatre when I got the opportunity to work on a
film, and I was fascinated by the art. I started doing very small films, then
moved in to television and then in to bigger films. It was all a very natural
progression and very organic, and I absolutely loved it," she told Weekend
Magazine last year.
"Awards season is incredible because you go through all
the rituals. The screenings, question and answer sessions and events all happen
before the big event. It's great because everyone there is completely obsessed
by film, and delightfully curious and enthusiastic."
Consolata has also worked on The Van, The Snapper and Into
the West.
In a successful day for Irish film, Irish-Ethiopian actress
Ruth Negga secured an Oscar nomination for Best Actress for her role in Loving,
while Irish-funded The Lobster, staring Colin Farrell, secured Oscar nomination
for Best Original Screenplay.
The 89th Academy Awards will be held at the Dolby Theatre at
Hollywood and Highland Center in Hollywood on February 26 and will be hosted by
Jimmy Kimmel.
HOW THE PERIOD COSTUMES IN JUDI DENCH'S 'VICTORIA AND ABDUL'
HELP TELL A STORY THAT WAS ALMOST LOST TO HISTORY
Costume designer Consolata Boyle's turn-of-the-century
wardrobe helps portray the unlikely friendship between Queen Victoria and her
Indian Muslim teacher Abdul Karim.
FAWNIA SOO HOOSEP 22, 2017
Based on the novel "Victoria & Abdul: The True
Story of the Queen’s Closest Confidant," by Shrabani Basu, the Dame Judi
Dench-starring film "Victoria and Abdul" sheds light on the close
friendship between Queen Victoria and Indian servant-turned-confidante Abdul
Karim. Out of fondness, the Queen (and Empress of India) bestowed privilege,
power and land to the Muslim Indian spiritual guide (or "munshi"), which
you can imagine did not go over well with the xenophobic court and royal
servants during the aggressive late "imperial century" portion of the
British colonial empire.
The true story of the unexpected (and then-controversial)
royal friendship also brings the opportunity for a sweeping, prestige period
drama by acclaimed director Stephen Frears — and the sumptuous costumes that
come with it. Although, I do feel the need to mention: While the movie tries to
emphasize cultural, ethnic and religious tolerance, it's hard to ignore Great
Britain's cruel colonial history and the icky mystical Asian man portrayal of
real person and colonial subject Abdul, played by Ali Fazal. That said, I'll
leave the in-depth discussion to the film and culture critics and focus instead
on the stunning 19th-century period costumes spanning the two cultures, created
by Consolata Boyle.
The costume design is even more notable considering that
much documentation of the Victoria and Abdul's relationship was destroyed and
lost to history. Plus, Queen Victoria famously wore black — as many women in
the Victorian period did — for her remaining 40 years after the passing of
beloved husband Albert in 1861, calling for extreme creativity when designing
dresses for a 2D film.
Of course, Boyle is no stranger to monumental period pieces,
especially ones depicting British monarchs played by knighted thespians. She
received her first Oscar nomination for the Frears-directed "The
Queen," starring Dame Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth II. (She earned her
second nod for dressing American movie royalty Meryl Streep in "Florence
Foster Jenkins" in 2016.) A longtime Frears collaborator, Boyle also
worked with the director and Dench on the Oscar-nominated "Philomena."
While on a quick visit to sunny Los Angeles to promote the
film, Boyle jumped on the phone to chat with me about how Queen Victoria's all
black wardrobe did evolve as she found happiness and joy in her friendship, how
costume reimagined the royal court tailor's cultural appropriation of Abdul's
first outfit in Great Britain and what it's like working with the formidable
Dame Judi Dench.
What challenges did you face when working with so much
Victorian-era black? How did make Queen Victoria's dresses so dynamic for the
big screen?
It is true that she wore black and so did much of her court
and many people in the Victorian Era, to which she gave her name. There was so
much death around — of children, of relations — and obviously she was in
deepest mourning for Albert after he died, then various other relations would
die, and then the mourning process would keep on going. But one thing that I
was very aware of with all the black is that we could use as much texture as
possible, and this really helped the lighting cameraman.
I had many conversations with mechanical and our lighting
cameraman about how to make black have more depth and be less flat and less
slightly light absorbing. In keeping with the fashion and facts of the time,
there was a lot of heavy embellishment on the gowns and a lot of detail, a lot
of embroidery, a lot of lace, a lot of layered on trim. Jet, which sparkles in
light, was a very common decoration. Pleating, frilling and masses of ribbon
was used in Victorian period to create texture and detail, and Victoria was a
great person for adding embellishment and the use of jewelry.
But also, in order to help us tell her story as [the
Queen's] relationship developed with Abdul, I used subtle different sorts of
dark tones, like very dark gray or turf brown or purples, which were a mourning
color, various purples and lavenders; then, of course, the traditional white,
which is a very important later stage mourning color. The lace and actual white
fabrics and silks used were part of the process of the mourning, but also
helped the telling of our story as things lightened, particularly during their
trips to Italy when she starts to rediscover joy, interest and the closeness of
her friendship with Abdul.
How did you research how to design Abdul's costumes,
especially since so much of the documentation had been destroyed?
Very, very deliberately, masses of visual reference were
lost — particularly of him and of the two of them together — which there had
been a lot of. But there was a enough. We did a massive amount of research and
we found in various archives images of Abdul as he progressed through the royal
household. When he started, that uniform he and [fellow Indian servant]
Mohammed [played by Adeel Akhtar] were put in initially [above] is like a
concoction of a Western version of what they think an Indian and a servant
would wear. In many aways it echoes what the servants in the royal household
wore — the gold-embellishment and trim — and it had a very Indian feel (or what
the royal tailors perceive to be an Indian feel), which of course was always a
made-up look.
Then, you could see as Abdul became 'munshi' — as she made
him her 'munshi' and teacher — he started to wear more flamboyant, more
traditional Indian clothing of high ranking [below]; a lot of silks, a lot of
rich colors, a lot of surface details. As he progressed, and became more
pompous and caused more discord in the royal household, his visual look added
also to the disquiet and the racism [from] within the household, which is quite
obvious to our story. So it was a progression from the very simple look of when
he's in Agra as a lowly clerk and to the royal household where he's first a
servant and then moves on to becoming dangerously close to the Queen, to the
horror of everybody.
The beginning of the movie shows an aging Queen Victoria
being woken and physically dressed by a procession of dressers and ladies-in
waiting; how did that whole elaborate scene affect your job as the costume
designer?
It was very important, right from when she's hauled out of
bed, literally comatose, by her personal servants and her maids of the bed
chamber, to when she starts the process, so that the actor feels the
constraints of the corset and the feeling of the weight of the clothes of that
period and how they would affect how people walked while bringing all this
fabric around with them and whipping it around as they turned corners and how
it limited what a person could do. All of that was very important to get that
feeling.
But also Victoria's passivity and — through the feeling of
sadness about that scene of dressing scene — of her literally being treated
like a child and literally sticking her arms, like, her arms out, arms up, in
you go, out you go. That kind of strange set up — this mixture from her servants
of fear and yet arrogance — that comes with power and obviously, she's at an
age and a frail woman at that point. She ends at the state banquet, and that
obviously is the [culmination] of her dressing [with the] final look of how she
is at her entrance and sitting at the head of the long table at the state
banquet.
The state banquet scene in the beginning was spectacular in
terms of the number of people in costume and the overall composition. How did
you handle that?
I'm very lucky in that I had a brilliant team, and that
particular scene was brought forward in the schedule, which obviously is
everybody's nightmare working in film. It was a massive rush to get it ready.
All of the ladies of the court and the gentlemen of the court and all of the
servants and everything had to be completely right and yet have a flexibility,
so you felt it was real and that people were not just costumed dummies — that
everybody had a life and a background and a history of their own that every
single person was unique. We worked very hard.
What was it like working for a second time with Dame Judi
Dench, and how did your costumes to help put her in her role?
We worked very closely together. We have a lot of laughs. We
worked our way through everything: the weight of the costumes, the amount of
changes, how they expressed the woman, how we going to use the different dark
colors to express the development of the relationship, that woman's character —
and Judi just takes this. She has this wonderful instinctive skill — genius —
and it's almost mysterious. It's wonderful, you observe it in some great
actors. You cannot pin it down. She has this amazing ability to totally absorb
the character and just seamlessly work [in] and it's like something that's
intuitive in her. She opens herself up in every way, to life in every character
she plays. She's completely fearless and watching that and being part of that
was an absolute joy.
Homepage photo: Peter Mountain / Focus Features
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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