Norma Moriceau obit

Norma Moriceau obituary

This article is more than 8 years old

Costume designer who gave the Mad Max films their distinctive visual style

 She was not on the list.

The film costume designer Norma Moriceau, who has died aged 72, was part of the small network of provocateurs who clustered round the enterprises Malcolm McLaren ran in the 1970s at 430 King’s Road, Chelsea. As Too Fast to Live Too Young to Die, the shop sold vintage biker gear; as Sex, it mainstreamed niche fetish and S&M-wear labels, and the improvisations of McLaren’s partner, Vivienne Westwood, which codified punk; as Seditionaries, it experimented with renegade politics. Moriceau would draw on them all for her work on the Mad Max films, Mad Max II: The Road Warrior (1981) and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985).

Moriceau, an Australian working in fashion in London in that era, lived round the corner from McLaren and Westwood, shot ads with them and took pictures of punk’s roster (including a Westwood portrait, all jags and spikes). She styled McLaren, Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten for the film The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle (1980), to which she also contributed her Super-8 footage of the Sex Pistols.

She returned temporarily to Australia to do more conventional film costume design, including 1950s-60s period outfits for Phillip Noyce’s Newsfront (1978), and a children’s film, Fatty Finn (1980), and was introduced to George Miller, director of Mad Max (1979). He had barely bothered with costume for his original film, outfitting Mel Gibson in pricey biker leathers and everybody else in cheap vinyl copies, but he needed a fully imagined aesthetic for The Road Warrior, because its characters would also serve as set decoration, while their back-stories could only be filled in through the way they looked.

For Road Warrior and Thunderdome Moriceau provided her synthesis of the avant garde of the previous 15 years. Punk was defunct by the time the films were released, so her work should have looked dated from the start. Instead, her assemblies of junk, rawhide and hand-soldered metal (70lb of coat hangers and chicken wire, plus shoulder-padded chain mail chinking on Tina Turner in Thunderdome) escaped fashion to become the folk costume of fantasy apocalypse in films, television, comics and games. “Male trouble,” was how she described the mode to Rolling Stone magazine. “Big butch business.”

Moriceau had grown up in Wollongong, New South Wales, and Sydney; she went to the UK in 1964, intending to model. (The founder of the Traverse theatre in Edinburgh, Jim Haynes, remembered her waitressing between jobs, eagerly seeing fringe stage productions.) She moved to styling fashion for newspapers, and the magazines 19 and Honey, had bit parts in a couple of short films, wrote a third, and at last found her metier supplying rough outback period costumes for the Australian picture Journey Among Women (1977).

Australia became her base again during the Mad Max movies, and she sourced much raw material there: she bought S&M gear from a boutique near her home in Sydney, recycled rags and repurposed scrapyard finds, and commissioned bigger stuff welded in workshops. In 2015, in retirement and ailing, she had to back out of Miller’s 30-year-delayed Mad Max sequel Fury Road during its prolonged pre-production phase, but her successor, Jenny Beavan, inherited boxes of tat chosen by Moriceau and stored in a studio warehouse.

The young and handsome Gibson had been easily made over into Max, but Moriceau deserves more credit for transforming a leathery sprite, Paul Hogan, into the plausible hero of Crocodile Dundee (1986), and its 1988 sequel, using just a bush-hat adorned with half a jaw’s-worth of crocodile teeth and boots with visibly heavy mileage. She could do ordinary contemporary clothes for, among others, Phillip Noyce – Dead Calm (1989) and a standard Hollywood picture, Patriot Games (1992) – but she disliked Hollywood’s competitive, production-line norm and usually avoided working for it.

Her art direction for Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild (1986), though, carried over her bricolage approach to the film’s overall appearance, which still feels wildly original. Moriceau and Demme foraged for months in flea markets and garage sales to dress its location shoots with dense detail. Every item of clutter tells the story.

That was also the way Moriceau lived – besides an apartment in Sydney, she lived in her “humpy”, a home patched together from found items, in rural New South Wales. Until she became ill with cancer, she made frequent nomadic trips across Africa and India. There was no marriage and no children, and even friends and colleagues she knew for decades were told very little about her background and private life. A sister, Marion, survives her.

Writer

Galaxy's Last Tape

Short

Writer

1977

 

Actress

Christian Roberts in Short Ends (1976)

Short Ends

9.4

Short

Guest at Party (as Norma Morriceau)

1976

 

Judy Geeson and Christian Roberts in Put Yourself in My Place (1974)

Put Yourself in My Place

4.5

Short

Friend of Mrs. Blake

1974

 

Production Designer

Dolph Lundgren in The Punisher (1989)

The Punisher

5.6

Production Designer

1989

 

Melanie Griffith and Jeff Daniels in Something Wild (1986)

Something Wild

6.9

Production Designer

1986

 

Costume Designer

Angelina Jolie and Clive Owen in Beyond Borders (2003)

Beyond Borders

6.4

Costume Designer

2003

 

Michael Caine, Brendan Fraser, and Do Thi Hai Yen in The Quiet American (2002)

The Quiet American

7.0

Costume Designer

2002

 

Fox Studios Australia: The Grand Opening (1999)

Fox Studios Australia: The Grand Opening

7.4

TV Special

costume designer: the opening production number

1999

 

Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (1998)

Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny

7.0

TV Movie

Costume Designer

1998

 

Elizabeth Daily and Danny Mann in Babe: Pig in the City (1998)

Babe: Pig in the City

5.9

Costume Designer

1998

 

The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996)

The Island of Dr. Moreau

4.6

Costume Designer

1996

 

Ray Liotta, Kevin Dillon, Ernie Hudson, and Stuart Wilson in No Escape (1994)

No Escape

6.1

Costume Designer

1994

 

Karina Lombard and Nathaniel Parker in Wide Sargasso Sea (1993)

Wide Sargasso Sea

5.6

Costume Designer

1993

 

Harrison Ford, Anne Archer, and Sean Bean in Patriot Games (1992)

Patriot Games

6.8

Costume Designer

1992

 

Dolph Lundgren in The Punisher (1989)

The Punisher

5.6

Costume Designer

1989

 

Nicole Kidman in Dead Calm (1989)

Dead Calm

6.8

Costume Designer

1989

 

Paul Hogan and Linda Kozlowski in Crocodile Dundee II (1988)

Crocodile Dundee II

5.7

Costume Designer

1988

 

Melanie Griffith and Jeff Daniels in Something Wild (1986)

Something Wild

6.9

Costume Designer

1986

 

Paul Hogan in Crocodile Dundee (1986)

Crocodile Dundee

6.6

Costume Designer

1986

 

Mel Gibson, Toni Allaylis, Helen Buday, Justine Clarke, Mark Kounnas, Adam Scougall, Shane Tickner, Tina Turner, James Wingrove, and Rod Zuanic in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome

6.2

Costume Designer

1985

 

Street Hero (1984)

Street Hero

5.5

Costume Designer

1984

 

Tommy Lee Jones and Michael O'Keefe in Nate and Hayes (1983)

Nate and Hayes

6.1

Costume Designer

1983

 

The Road Warrior (1981)

The Road Warrior

7.6

Costume Designer (costume design)

1981

 

Fatty Finn (1980)

Fatty Finn

6.6

Costume Designer

1980

 

The Chain Reaction (1980)

The Chain Reaction

5.3

Costume Designer

1980

 

Paul Cook, Steve Jones, John Lydon, Glen Matlock, Malcolm McLaren, Sid Vicious, and Helen Wellington-Lloyd in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980)

The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle

6.4

Costume Designer

1980

 

Newsfront (1978)

Newsfront

6.9

Costume Designer

1978

 

Journey Among Women (1977)

Journey Among Women

5.4

Costume Designer

1977

 

Camera and Electrical Department

Paul Cook, Steve Jones, John Lydon, Glen Matlock, Malcolm McLaren, Sid Vicious, and Helen Wellington-Lloyd in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980)

The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle

6.4

camera operator: 8mm camera

1980

 

Costume Department

The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash (1978)

The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash

7.3

TV Movie

assistant costumes

1978

 

Self

The Punisher: Gag Reel

Video

Self

2013

 

Archive Footage

'Punisher' vu par Mark Goldblatt (2016)

'Punisher' vu par Mark Goldblatt

Video

Self (archive footage)

2016