Alan MacDonald: production designer behind ‘Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’ and ‘The Queen’

The set designer Alan MacDonald, who has died aged 61, achieved distinction across several fields.The past 20 years saw his lifelong affinity with art, culture and fashion become crystallised with his production designs for feature films. Stephen Frears, for whom MacDonald designed seven films, remembers that “he used to guide me through films. He’d say ‘let’s make a film there’, and he would somehow lead me there.”

MacDonald was born in Fareham in Hampshire. His father Ian was a commander in the Royal Navy, his mother Jean a physiotherapist. The middle child of three brothers, Macdonald developed his abilities for pottery, design and fine art while attending Churcher’s College, Petersfield. Going on to Portsmouth art college and Kingston Polytechnic, and designing record sleeves for bands, by the mid-1980s he was part of a London artistic collective playfully termed the House of Beauty and Culture (Hobac).

Based in Dalston in the East End, long before that area became modish, the Hobac movement specialised in reordering the everyday. Calling themselves Fric and Frack, MacDonald and partner Fritz Solomon constructed furniture from waste, anticipating his resourceful use of existing visual artefacts in films.

Hobac’s other acolytes included director John Maybury, who utilised MacDonald as designer and visual coordinator on music promos for Sinead O’Connor, Boy George and Neneh Cherry. Later, he designed cabaret-styled sets for two stage tours by Kylie Minogue, for which he obtained tickets for Frears’s disabled son, “so I worshipped him”, recalled Frears. After contributing to several of Maybury’s experimental films, he recreated Francis Bacon’s studio for the director’s feature-length Love is the Devil (1998).

Frears collaborated with MacDonald on The Queen (2006), which earned the latter nominations for the British Independent Film and Art Directors Guild awards. MacDonald then returned to Maybury and bohemia for The Edge of Love (2008).

Recognising MacDonald’s “strong sense of imagination”, Frears then explored art nouveau with him in Chéri (2009), and then after Tamara Drewe (2010), the pair deployed a “Robin Hood castle” in Oxfordshire and a house near Rickmansworth as an Irish abbey in Philomena (2013). After adapting to America and the Alps for The Program (2015), MacDonald evoked 1940s New York through sets at Twickenham Studios, and “designs made out of bits of cardboard”, in Florence Foster Jenkins (2016). He then returned to Maybury and bohemia

The film producer Tracey Seaward recalls him as a “slender, handsome” figure, “whose immaculate dress sense stood out on a film set”. She also recollects his “intimate and creative partnerships” with leading actors, including Helen Mirren, Maggie Smith, Meryl Streep and Judi Dench. “Judi adored him,” says Frears. Dench, who briefly studied design in her youth, said that seeing MacDonald observing the actors on his set for The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011) with “the perfect sense of a production designer” confirmed for her that acting had been the right choice. Another Art Directors Guild award nomination followed.

For director Thea Sharrock, MacDonald designed the Henry V segment of The Hollow Crown (BBC, 2012) and the set for Kevin Spacey’s one-man play Darrow (Old Vic, 2014). His final collaboration with Frears, Victoria and Abdul, was released last month. At the time of his death, he was working with Marigold Hotel colleague Oliver Parker on the musical sequel Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again.

Alan MacDonald, production designer, born 23 June 1956, died 30 August 2017