FROM STAR TREK TO NUTCRACKER,
ORSON WELLES TO NOËL COWARD,
ROBERT FLETCHER LEFT HIS WHIMSICAL MARK
Robert Fletcher, the prolific costume designer for both stage and screen, died peacefully in Kansas City, MO on April 5 at the age of 98.
Robert “Bob” Fletcher was a costume designer with more than six decades of experience. He is best known for his work on the first four Star Trek films, and is considered the father of the classic Klingon and Vulcan, as we know them today.
His was married, for 65 years, to the late Jack Kauflin, who was an original member of the New York City Ballet, a singer, and a Broadway dancer.
Fletcher enjoyed a varied career in which he designed sets and costumes for Lincoln Kirstein’s ballet and opera projects, worked with Jerome Robbins on musicals, designed the costumes for the original Broadway productions of the musicals How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and Walking Happy and designed the costumes for and played the role of Edgar in Orson Welles’s 1956 New York City Center production of Shakespeare’s King Lear. His work extended into television, where in the 1950s he was NBC’s general designer. Fletcher produced Noël Coward’s High Spirits and the off-Broadway revival of Best Foot Forward which introduced a new star, Liza Minnelli.
Throughout his celebrated career, Fletcher received three Tony Award nominations for his work on Little Me (1963), High Spirits (1964), for which he was a co-producer, scenic and costume designer, and Hadrian VII (1969). He received a Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Costume Design for Othello in 1982 starring James Earl Jones, Christopher Plummer and Dianne Wiest. He was nominated for three Saturn Awards (an honor given to the best in science fiction, fantasy and horror movies) and in 1987 won the Saturn for Star Trek IV and was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Costume Design for a Miniseries or a Special for North and South, Book II (1986). In 2005 Fletcher was awarded the Career Achievement Award from the Costume Designers Guild and in 2008, received a Theatre Development Fund / Irene Sharaff Lifetime Achievement Award for his set design.
