James Acheson
Title
Honorary Fellow
Person Type
Honorary
James Acheson is a graduate of Wimbledon College of Art and has made a significant contribution to the arts as a designer for film, television and theatre, in a career spanning almost 50 years.
He has won three Academy Awards for his costume designs for Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (1987), Stephen Frears’ Dangerous Liaisons (1988) and Michael Hoffman’s Restoration (1996), together with British Academy Awards for The Last Emperor and Dangerous Liaisons.
His television credits include 36 episodes of Doctor Who, for which he designed the iconic scarf and his film projects encompass work with Terry Jones (The Meaning of Life, The Wind in the Willows), Terry Gilliam (Time Bandits, Brazil) Bernardo Bertolucci (The Last Emperor, The Sheltering Sky, Little Buddha) and Sam Raimi (Spiderman I, II and III). His work has been seen in many of the notable fantasies and costume dramas created in the last 40 years, with other films including Highlander, Wuthering Heights, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, The Man in the Iron Mask, Daredevil, The Warrior’s Way and Superman: Man of Steel.
For the stage, James Acheson created set and costume designs for Jonathan Miller’s productions of The Marriage of Figaro for both the Vienna State Opera (1991) and the Metropolitan Opera in New York (1999). In 1995 he designed the costumes for Jonathan Kent’s Hamlet at London’s Hackney Empire which later transferred to Broadway. He has recently designed the sets and costumes for Prokofiev's "Romeo and Juliet" for the Royal New Zealand Ballet in Wellington, New Zealand which will transfer to Perth, Australia in August 2024.