My husband, Stuart Walker, who has died aged 91, was an award-winning production designer in film and television in a career that spanned 50 years, the first 30 at the BBC and then working freelance.
His BBC career started in 1959 in Schools Television and by 1968 he had become a senior designer in the BBC design department. He enjoyed working collaboratively with many of the leading directors and producers of the day, balancing design requirements with imaginative visual solutions, resulting in sets created for the studio and on location. He worked on productions ranging from Doctor Who to Shakespeare, classic drama series and contemporary single plays.
He won two Baftas, both for BBC work. The first, in 1983, was for his design for the television film An Englishman Abroad, written by Alan Bennett and directed by John Schlesinger, for which Stuart turned Dundee into a snowy and totally convincing 1950s Moscow. His second was for Portrait of a Marriage (1990), a lavish period drama series based on the book by Nigel Nicolson about the marriage of his parents Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, and set in Edwardian England and France. He was nominated for a third Bafta in 1994 for Scarlet and Black, set in 19th-century France.
In 1988 his extraordinary bleak and expressionistic designs for Road, a film in BBC Two’s ScreenPlay anthology series written by Jim Cartwright, directed by Alan Clarke and set in a deprived working-class area of Lancashire in 1980s Britain, won him a Royal Television Society award.
Stuart was born in Manchester to William, a salesman, and his wife, Annie (nee Jackson), an accounts clerk. He had a younger sister, Shirley. With his father away during the second world war, the family moved to Blackpool, where at 13 he went to Blackpool junior art school, subsequently studying at the main Blackpool Art School from the age of 16 to 20.
Graduating with a first-class national diploma in design and painting in 1952, he went on the following year to the Royal Academy Schools in London, where he completed a five-year diploma course – winning a David Murray scholarship for landscape painting, a silver medal for drawing and a bronze medal for painting – before joining the BBC.
I was fortunate enough to work with Stuart as his art director during the late 1980s, and we married in 2000. Post-BBC he continued designing film and TV productions until he was 78, including The Camomile Lawn (1992) for Channel 4, and he also taught at the National Film and Television School. His film work included A Private Function (1984), directed by Malcolm Mowbray.
In 1989 he was appointed a Royal Designer for Industry. Admired for his professional expertise and flair, Stuart was also much respected by his colleagues for his personal qualities of humility, kindness, integrity and leadership.
He is survived by me, our son, Jack, his daughters, Anna and Lucy, from his first marriage, to Cherry Atkinson, which ended in divorce, and his grandchildren, Milo, Sam and Joe.
