‘I couldn’t be less interested in fashion’: the designer who dressed Mad Max and Cruella – and changed the world

Up for a fourth Oscar thanks to Mrs Harris Goes to Paris, Jenny Beavan talks about her bohemian childhood, her early work with Merchant Ivory and how she deals with difficult actors

If you spot a woman trying to surreptitiously take a photo of you on the bus – you’d have to look interesting – there’s a fair chance it might be Jenny Beavan. “I am the biggest people-watcher ever,” says Beavan, the British costume director who is up for her fourth Oscar next month. She took a secret photo the other day, she says, of “a fabulous woman. I don’t know whether she was from a sect or something – she was wearing white and had the most extraordinary white hat on. She was amazing; she looked like a sort of strange clown. I snuck a photo.” Elements of it might make it into a film – “I might be doing something to do with ghosts” – but it will be squirrelled away in Beavan’s mind, even if she can’t find the actual photo now to show me. She sighs and puts her phone away.

We are sitting in her office at the back of her beautiful London house, where she has lived for more than 30 years. Beavan has a straightforward, no-nonsense manner, but she’s also incredibly warm, her grey curls bouncing around her face, so the effect isn’t austere but fun and surprisingly comforting. If you were a film star, you would think nothing of telling her all your secrets while she was dressing you. Does she get good gossip? “Oh yeah,” she says, with a glint of mischief. “It’s like the confessional. Thank God I’ve got a really pants memory and can’t remember a thing, because I do hear some fairly intimate stuff. I’ve been very good, I’ve never divulged.”

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