Elaine Garrard

Published Monday 23 June 2008 at 16:15 by Paul Allen

Designer, prop and costume maker Elaine Garrard, who has died of cancer aged 63, steadfastly resisted the limelight, but few theatre workers have reached so many people.

The World of Beatrix Potter in Bowness-on-Windermere, which she co-designed and made, has been seen by 2.5 million people. When Renee Zellweger was filming Miss Potter in the Lake District it was with one of Garrard’s models that she was presented. Her first employer, Colin George (to whom she posted a collapsible headdress just before entering hospital), says she was above all an artist. And Glen Walford, who also met her at Sheffield Playhouse, called her simply “a genius”.

Born in Edgware, north London, on October 13, 1944, she trained under Ralph Koltai at the Central School of Art and Design. An arts council bursary took her to Sheffield in 1967 and the influence of Tanya Moiseiwitsch, making masks for The Caucasian Chalk Circle designed by her and directed by George. She joined Moiseiwitsch at Stratford Ontario, returning for the opening of the Crucible in 1971. She responded at once to the open stage’s need for better quality design and making - Calamity Jane, Treasure Island and Dracula are among shows remembered as utterly dependent on often witty design but not showing it off, the keynote of Elaine’s professional career.

Freelance from 1977, she worked for the Royal Exchange, London Bubble and - for Glen Walford again - at the Liverpool Everyman. Walford recalls a School for Scandal which was in period “but not pretty - very Hogarthian” and The Beggar’s Opera in which modern clothes were cannibalised to create a sense of period, “genius on a shoestring”.

Collaboration with designer Roger Glossop led to extensive work with Alan Ayckbourn in Scarborough, at the National Theatre and in the West End, and then to The World of Beatrix Potter, The Wind in the Willows (Henley). Tetley’s Brewery Wharf (Leeds) and attractions in Oxford and Dover.

She combined meticulous authenticity with a special feel for creating lifelike babies and animals. A “swan” falling out of her bag in a restaurant caused consternation all round. She died after a very short illness on May 10.