Trivia

Educated at the London School of Architecture.

He served with the Royal Armoured Corps in France during World War II.

After Chinese officials refused to allow The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958) to be filmed in China, he constructed a walled Chinese city in Wales.

He built Doctor Zhivago (1965)'s Russian country house in Spain, and used white plastic sheets and marble dust to replicate a snowy landscape.

He was noted for recreating exotic locations in unlikely settings.

Member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Art Directors Branch)

After producing The Looking Glass War (1970), he hoped to become a director, but this never happened - something for which he was inclined to blame David Lean, who was keen not to lose his services as a production designer. His relationship with Lean in subsequent years was rather fractious - Box did a lot of preliminary work on Lean's planned two films about the "Bounty" mutineers and later on his final project, "Nostromo", but Lean never made these films.

In Lawrence of Arabia (1962), after filming the well scene when Ali (Omar Sharif) meets Lawrence, including the classic series of shots of Ali's long arrival from the horizon, David Lean said to John Box that the location Box had created was "the best bit of production design you'll ever do." Apart from the well itself, the design consisted solely of black paint "arrows" on the desert ground, which lead the viewer's eye to the horizon, and a straight yellow line so the camel Ali rode on didn't deviate from the central point of the long shot.

Legendary production designer John Box(1929-2005) designed three Academy Award 'Best Picture' winners (Lawrence of Arabia (1962), A Man for All Seasons (1966), Oliver! (1968)) and three Academy Award 'Best Picture' nominees (Doctor Zhivago (1965), Nicholas and Alexandra (1971), A Passage to India (1984)) in his unparalleled career. He was nominated 6 times for the Academy Award, winning 4 times, and 6 times for the BAFTA, winning 3 times.

In the late 1960s, he was anxious to make his debut as director with a film version of David Halliwell's play, "Little Malcolm And His Struggle Against The Eunuchs"; there eventually was a film made from it, in 1974, but Stuart Cooper directed it. In the event, Box never directed a film.

He was to have been production designer on David Lean's adaptation of the Joseph Conrad novel Nostromo. He was already supervising the construction of sets at Les Studios de la Victorine in Nice before Lean's death in April 1991 brought the production to an end.