"King Kong" effects wizard dies at 101

Reuters

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) – Harry Redmond Jr., a special effects artist and producer whose career reached back more than 80 years to the dawn of talking pictures, has died at the age of 101.

He died May 23 in the Hollywood Hills home that he and his wife designed and built more than six decades ago.

Redmond got his first big break at RKO Radio Pictures, where he worked on such films as "King Kong" (1933), "The Last Days of Pompeii" (1935), "She" (1935) and "Top Hat" (1935).

As an independent, he went on to create effects for such classics as Frank Capra's "Lost Horizon" (1937), Howard Hawks' "Only Angels Have Wings" (1939), Howard Hughes' "The Outlaw (1943), Fritz Lang's "The Woman in the Window" (1944) and Orson Welles' "The Stranger" (1946).

Redmond would often work one-on-one with the director to provide a specific effect. In "The Woman in the Window," he and Lang collaborated on the striking transition shot of Edward G. Robinson at the film's end, doing it all in real time, in camera, with no cuts and no postproduction work.

While working on "The Prisoner of Zenda" (1937) for David O. Selznick, Redmond met Dorothea Holt, a pioneering production illustrator who was designing the interiors for "Gone With the Wind" (1939) and "Rebecca" (1940). They were married in 1940.

After World War Two, during which he designed and built a studio for the Army Film Training Lab, Redmond returned to Hollywood to work on such films as the Marx Brothers' "A Night in Casablanca" (1946), "Angel on My Shoulder" (1946), "The Bishop's Wife" (1947), "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" (1947) and "A Song Is Born" (1948).

Redmond was never nominated for an Oscar or an Emmy, nor did he receive any industry awards.

Holt, who helped design the Seattle Space Needle, the restaurant at Los Angeles International Airport and much of Main Street at Disneyland following her career in films, died in 2009 at age 98.