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The Early Years

John Truscott was born in 1936 in the Melbourne suburb of Ormond and, throughout his life, regardless of all the achievements and accolades won elsewhere, returning to Melbourne was always, for him, ‘coming home.’ He loved everything about the city; its lush public gardens, grand Victorian architecture, eclectic restaurants, abundant markets, hidden laneways and secret spaces and, above all, its people. He would say that ‘a friend in Australia is quite different from a friend elsewhere. It is a warmer, much more open and direct friendship than I’ve encountered anywhere else in the world.’

John’s intuitive feeling for design surfaced early. At sixteen, having completed his studies at Caulfield Technical College, he sent a folio of drawings to the director of The National Theatre, the formidable Gertrude Johnson. She referred him to William Carr, who put him back stage and saw to it that he gained acting experience. 

He quickly captured the attention of the theatre world with his set and costume design for the National’s 1954 youth production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream which critics described as captivatingly magic. Beside appearing in drama and ballet productions, John immersed himself in the National’s workshops developing his signature hands-on skills while working backstage on the National’s arts festival productions including Gian Carlo Menotti’s modernist operas, and assisting Kenneth Rowell with his preparation for the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust’s 1956 inaugural Mozart opera season.

1936

Born 23 February, 1936 in Ormond, Melbourne. 

1951

Leaves Caulfield Junior Technical College to be apprenticed to a fitter and turner.

1952

Leaves home at 16 and joins the Australian National Theatre Movement having first sent the director Gertrude Johnson a folio of drawings. 

1954

Emerges as a young talent with his scenery and costumes designs, for two National Theatre productions of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 

The Little Theatre (St Martins) and Camelot

Word soon got around about this young, talented designer and directors Irene Mitchell, Brett and Peter Randall and George Fairfax invited him in early 1957 to join them at The Melbourne Little Theatre, a company with a reputation for a wide-ranging, thought-provoking repertoire. John spent six years as their resident designer at St Martin’s and designed more than eighty productions in the process achieving multiple awards and many firsts. Faced with three week turn-arounds Truscott developed exceptional intuitive abilities, inventiveness and attention to detail He would say later that it was here, under the exacting eye of his ‘theatrical mum,’ Irene Mitchell, that he truly learned his trade.

During this time John met Garnet H. Carroll, part owner of one of Melbourne’s grand Princess Theatre. Carroll was impressed by what he had seen of John’s work and began to commission him to assist wardrobe with the big shows he was bringing in from overseas; West Side Story, The Music Man, The Most Happy Fella and The King and I. 

In 1963 Australia’s leading production company J. C. Williamson’s, approached John to design what would be its most lavish production to date, Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot starring Paul Daneman and Jacquelyn McKever. Produced by the legendary choreographer and producer Betty Pounder it marked the beginning of a remarkable life-long friendship.

Seeing the show in Melbourne and wanting to get Truscott to rework Camelot for London’s Royal Drury Lane Theatre, Sir Robert Helpmann cabled Irene Mitchell, ‘Where is Truscott?’  John was on his way to London to study aided by a testimonial funds raised by Irene Mitchell and Melbourne’s theatre community.

1956

Resident designer at The Little Theatre, St Martin’s Lane, South Yarra. Truscott and Peter Randall’s production of The Caine Munity Court Martial HSV-7 was the first drama produced by a commercial Australian television station. 

1960

Assists wardrobe for The Merry Widow, West Side Story, The Music Man and Most Happy Fella for Garnet H. Carroll, of the Princess Theatre, while fulfilling his design commitments with The Little Theatre.

1962

The King and I for Garnet H. Carroll.  

1963

Camelot for J. C. Williamson Theatres

Vanessa Redgrave as Lady Guinevere in 'Camelot'
Designed by John Truscott — 1967

Vanessa Redgrave as Lady Guinevere in 'Camelot'
Designed by John Truscott — 1967

Vanessa Redgrave as Lady Guinevere in 'Camelot'
Designed by John Truscott — 1967

Vanessa Redgrave as Lady Guinevere in 'Camelot'
Designed by John Truscott — 1967

Vanessa Redgrave as Lady Guinevere in 'Camelot'
Designed by John Truscott — 1967

London

The London production of Camelot was a major success and from then on John found himself plied with commissions from Sadler’s Wells, the Festival Ballet and from the West End. Early 1966 he received a phone call from Hollywood producer, Jack Warner, inviting him to Hollywood to design the film version of Camelot.

1964

Resident designer at The Little Theatre, St Martin’s Lane, South Yarra. Truscott and Peter Randall’s production of The Caine Munity Court Martial HSV-7 was the first drama produced by a commercial Australian television station. 

Hollywood

John now found himself in control of a design studio and production workshops covering several acres of the Warner Brother’s Burbank studio lot and loved it. His close friend and collaborator, Graham Bennett, observed that ‘John slipped into the Californian way of life like the true film fan he had always been. He loved the warmth, the space, the optimism and being surrounded by beautiful people. For the rest of his life John never lost his fascination with America and the best it had to offer: its energy and enthusiasm, its brashness and optimism and the belief that absolutely everything was possible. True to the spirit of the place he even owned a leopard for awhile!’ 

In 1968 John won two Academy Awards for Camelot, one for costume design and one for art direction. The director Joshua Logan in a letter to him, wrote, ‘you’ve made this picture have the kind of beauty I dreamed it might have, but never really believed it would.’  

Famous and much sought after, John began work as Production Designer on Paint Your Wagon which together with Camelot would earnt Truscott a reputation for being a big budget designer.

1966

Design costumes and sets for Warner Bros Camelot -director Joshua Logan-starring Vanessa Redgrave, Richard Harris and Franco Nero.

1968

Truscott wins two Oscars for Camelot, one for Costume Design and one for Art Direction with Edward Carrere.

1969

Production designer for Paramount Studio’s Paint Your Wagon; Producer Alan Jay Lerner, Director Joshua Logan. Starring Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin.

1972

Production designer for Paramount Studio’s The Great Gatsby, the production of which is cancelled.

Presentation drawings for Paint Your Wagon
John Truscott — 1969

Presentation drawings for Paint Your Wagon
John Truscott — 1969

Presentation drawings for Paint Your Wagon
John Truscott — 1969

Coming Home

The Victorian Arts Centre

In the late 1970s John returned to Melbourne several times to design the new Victorian State Opera’s much acclaimed Idomeneo and The Pearl Fishers. Many of his design team at the Opera were to join him later at the Arts Centre. John demanded a great deal from his creative team but ‘this was one of his great gifts,’ says Sue Nattrass, ‘inspiring and demanding that their full potential be achieved, that they not settle for less than their best.’

In 1980 at the request of George Fairfax, now general manager of the Victorian Arts Centre, John agreed to take on the formidable task of designing the interior finishes of the Sir Roy Grounds designed Theatres building, with its three theatres, multiple foyers and enormous public spaces, and the Concert Hall, together with the backstage areas, rehearsal spaces restaurants, cafes and galleries that comprise the whole Centre.

John was acutely aware that people came to the theatre to see a show and that the interiors, paintings, lighting and furnishings, needed to enhance, not compete with, that experience. He delighted in using painting techniques that produced dense, sensual, many-layered textures and effects, and lighting that swam and reflected in seemingly never-ending pools from surface to surface creating spaces that were forever suggesting new possibilities.

The brilliance of John’s vision was the way in which he amplified the techniques that he had been using all his life, those of the theatre designer. ‘John generated a sense of illusion,’ says Professor Margaret Manion. ‘It was a dazzling theatrical presentation, lights, reflected surfaces…people going out on a cold Melbourne night and coming into this splendidly rich atmosphere. Roy (Grounds, the architect) talked in terms of a cathedral, of a vision of grandeur — Here it was.’

1976

Idomeneo and The Pearl Fishers for the Victorian State Opera. Both reworked for VSO and AO Sydney Opera House performances.

1980

Interior design and fitout of Sir Roy Grounds’ Victorian Arts Centre, Concert Hall and Theatres.

1985

Member of the Order of Australia

1986

Super Bowl XX Half Time with LA lighting designer Daniel Flannery

Brisbane World Expo

When John accepted the invitation to become the artistic director of the Brisbane World Expo he found himself with a very little time in which to create the spectacular event that people expected. That he did succeed so well was due, in large part, to the way in which he made it a festival for the people, creating intriguing, colourful, outdoor spaces and stages and filling them with strolling performers, sculptures, street processions and the extraordinary sight of wave upon wave of choreographed, dancing flags. So while people queued to see major exhibitions like the Treasures of the Vatican there was always something fascinating to watch.

1987

Sitescape Designer and Creative Director of the Brisbane World Expo88.

“Relentless, unyielding, totally committed and deliciously possessed. He was danger and delight rolled into one. And if occasionally exhaustion showed, it was soon forgotten in the maelstrom of ideas and opinions that emptied from his mind… I can think of no-one but John who has combined a searing belief in the importance of the arts with a practical ability to actually do it.”

— Barry Kosky

Melbourne International Festival

In 1989 John Truscott was appointed artistic director of the Spoleto Festival, (renamed the Melbourne International Arts Festival and now Rising Festival), following the departure of its founder, Gian Carlo Menotti. John’s festivals became renown for his championing of new, local work and the commissioning of gifted young artists like the landscape designer Paul Bangay (Botanica) and theatre director, Barry Kosky (The Knot Garden). As well as bringing to Melbourne many memorable productions; the Moscow Arts Theatre , Lloyd Newson’s DV8 and the Cullberg Ballet’s extraordinary reworking of Giselle among them, he dressed up the city in lights and fountains and flowers – one year he planted a whole cherry orchard in the Arts Centre’s Smorgon Plaza – and each year ensured that some element of the Festival remained to permanently enhance the city – the fountains in the moat of the National Gallery of Victoria and the lights in the gardens around the Arts Centre, on Flinders Street Station and along St Kilda Road.

The playwright, John Romeril, wrote during this time, ‘as an authentic son of this city you have pioneered for Melbourne a Melbourne-style festival. You have proved an international arts festival can also function as a populist event… Intruding the Festival into the public domain has meant fixing it in the popular imagination. Giving the Festival a street profile has meant positioning it as part of the civic calendar. In two whirlwind, adrenalin drenched years you’ve underpinned this Festival with the kind of popular and political protection it would have been a decade trying to secure.’

1989

Artistic Director of the Melbourne International Festival (formerly Spoleto Festival).

1992

Chief Artistic Advisor to the City of Melbourne and the Victorian Arts Centre from 1992–93.

John died, too soon, at the age of 57 following heart surgery and is buried in his beloved Dandenong Ranges outside Melbourne under a white dogwood tree. At the time he died he was working with Arts Centre chief, Sue Nattrass, on a plan for the refurbishment of the Centre’s interiors to mark its 10th birthday. He was also, at the invitation of the City of Melbourne, working on designs for the reinvigoration of the city’s laneways and public spaces, an idea for which he had been sowing the seeds for much of his life.

Soon after, the John Truscott Foundation was established to continue his work promoting and encouraging excellence in design.

1993

Dies at the age of 57 following heart surgery and is buried in the Dandenong Ranges. A few days later thousands of people congregate in the Melbourne Concert Hall for a memorial service.

Botanica at the Spoleto Festival.
Landscape designer — Paul Bangay

Botanica at the Spoleto Festival.
Landscape designer — Paul Bangay

Botanica at the Spoleto Festival.
Landscape designer — Paul Bangay

Botanica at the Spoleto Festival.
Landscape designer — Paul Bangay

Botanica at the Spoleto Festival.
Landscape designer — Paul Bangay