The production designer Stuart Craig, who has died aged 83 after suffering from Parkinson’s disease, played a major role in bringing the fantastical, magical world of Harry Potter to the screen. Craig’s set design skills had won him three Oscars, for Gandhi, Dangerous Liaisons and The English Patient, but creating the look of the film versions of JK Rowling’s stories about the schoolboy wizard was the crowning glory of his career.
He worked on all eight films in the series, from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in 2001 to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 in 2011, leading a large team of concept artists, art directors, set decorators, construction workers, painters and decorators, prop makers, plasterers and model makers.
In an interview with the Guardian in 2011, he recalled contemplating the daunting task during a flight to Los Angeles to meet David Heyman, the producer, and Chris Columbus, director of the first film. “I read the novel on the plane over,” he said. “My first reaction was fright: ‘How the hell are we going to do this?’”
A major challenge was to create Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, so he began by asking Rowling about its geography. “She immediately took out a pen and paper, and made the most extraordinarily complete map on a sheet of A4,” he recalled. “I was still referring to that map 10 years later on the eighth film.”
He created the Hogwarts castle exterior as an intricately detailed 1:24 scale model, a “big miniature”. As the story evolved over the years, it was gradually modified. Craig said he “took incredible liberties with continuity from one film to another”. Muted colours were the order of the day throughout Hogwarts scenes, inside and out.
For the final story, spreading the Deathly Hallows book over two films, the Hogwarts exterior went digital to make it bigger and allow for more detail to be picked up by the camera. “The physical model was scanned and that digital scan became the skeleton of the new digital model,” Craig said.
An interior, the Room of Requirement – first seen in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007) – began, said Craig, as a “crude, simplistic model just in Styrofoam” before its evolution into a large physical set, complete with secondhand furniture found at auctions. He always drew an initial pencil sketch, often guided by descriptions in the film scripts. The first for Hagrid’s Hut read: “Everything here is oversized.” Once created, the home of the half-giant wizard Hagrid was filled with simple furniture and animal cages by the set decorator.
Craig’s earlier film successes posed different challenges. For The Elephant Man (1980), starring John Hurt as a 19th-century man exhibited in a circus “freak show”, he designed Victorian England sets that combined with black-and-white photography to create a stark look and moody atmosphere. It earned him an Oscar nomination and the first of three Bafta awards.
Later, he had the challenge of working out of the studio, on location. Much of Gandhi (1982), which starred Ben Kingsley, was shot in India, while The Mission (1986) was made in the South American jungle – Craig credited the Italian classicism of one of his production design heroes, Ferdinando Scarfiotti (who made The Last Emperor and other films with the director Bernardo Bertolucci) as an inspiration for the latter film.
His opulent production design contributed significantly to the decadence of Dangerous Liaisons (1988), filmed in sumptuous period locations across France. Craig described The English Patient (1996) as “a difficult film logistically”, with the crew moving between Italy and Tunisia. “When you design a set in the studio, just by your placing of windows and doorways and furniture you condition the shooting,” he said. “In a location, that’s more difficult, of course, because things are not always where you would choose them to be.”
Craig was born in Norwich, to Kate (nee Ralph), who owned a wool shop, and Norman Craig, a publican. He painted scenery at the Maddermarket theatre while a pupil at the City of Norwich school, then went on to Norwich School of Art and Hornsey School of Art in London, and studied film design at the Royal College of Art (1963-66).
On graduating, he found work in the art department on the James Bond movie spoof Casino Royale (1967), making tea and learning the ropes. He moved on to be a draughtsperson on Three Sisters (1970), directed by Laurence Olivier, then assistant art director on films such as Scrooge (1970), Mary, Queen of Scots (1971), A Touch of Class (1973) and Royal Flash (1975). As art director, he worked on A Bridge Too Far (1977) and Superman (1978).
Craig’s 40-year-plus career as a production designer also took in the films Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984), Cal (1984), Cry Freedom (1987), Memphis Belle (1990), Chaplin (1992), The Secret Garden (1993), Shadowlands (1993), Mary Reilly (1996), The Avengers (1998), Notting Hill (1999), The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000) and all three in the Harry Potter spin-off prequel Fantastic Beasts (2016-22), winning a Bafta award for the first. His other Bafta honour came for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005), in addition to nominations for six other films in the series.
He and the set decorator Stephenie McMillan worked together on 16 movies over 30 years, including the entire Harry Potter series, for which they oversaw the art department and provided visual continuity. “She was responsible for the details that brought my vision as production designer to life,” Craig wrote in the Guardian in 2013 following her death. A year earlier, the series won an Art Directors Guild contribution to cinematic imagery award.
Craig, who was presented with the guild’s lifetime achievement award in 2008, also designed the Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme parks in Florida, Japan, Hollywood and Beijing.
He was made OBE in 2003.
In 1965, he married Patricia Stangroom. She, their two daughters, Laura and Becky, and four grandchildren survive him.