Jean-Pierre Dorléac, the costume designer who earned an Oscar nomination for his work on Somewhere in Time, the 1980 romantic fantasy that starred Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour, has died. He was 83.
Dorléac died Thursday of natural causes at his Hollywood Hills home, a family spokesperson announced.
For television, Dorléac won Emmys in 1979 for his costume designs for the ABC sci-fi series Battlestar Galactica and in 2001 for the AMC dark comedy The Lot, set in 1930s Hollywood. He was nominated nine other times, four of those for NBC’s time-traveling Quantum Leap (he worked on all four seasons of the show, from 1989-93).
Starting in 1977, Dorléac also designed for series including Blansky’s Beauties, Tales of the Gold Monkey, Manimal, The Greatest American Hero, Airwolf, Masquerade, Berrenger’s and Matlock.
His big-screen résumé included Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979), The Blue Lagoon (1980), Heart and Souls (1993), The Only Thrill (1997), Walking to the Waterline (1998) and In Enemy Hands (2004).
Dorléac was born on April 12, 1943, in Toulon, France, to an American military service member stationed with his family in Europe. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in France, and after his family moved back to the U.S., he started his career as an actor in Hollywood.
When one of his theater productions was looking for a costume designer, he grabbed that opportunity, which led him to design the costumes for Marat/Sade in 1973 for the West Coast Theatre in Los Angeles, earning a Drama Critics Circle Award. He would become a protégé of famed costume designer Edith Head’s.
As an author, Dorléac wrote the 2005 novel Abracabra Alakazama and 2015’s The Naked Truth: An Irreverent Chronicle of Delirious Escapades, a book about Hollywood and glamour in the 1980s.
Survivors include his spouse, Gilberto Mello, whom he met 41 years ago in Rio de Janeiro. Per his wishes, there won’t be a memorial service or funeral “as he wanted people to remember him making jokes, telling stories, laughing and designing beautiful costumes.”
