Sharaff, Irene (1910–1993)

US stage and film designer. The costumes and sometimes also sets she designed in both theatre and cinema, especially for musicals, provided a key element in a range of productions, varying from the Oriental silks and Victorian crinolines of The King and I (stage 1950, film 1956) to the jeans and T-shirts of West Side Story (stage 1958, film 1961). She won five Academy Awards.

She was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and was engaged by the songwriter Irving Berlin to work on his Broadway revue As Thousands Cheer (1933). She went on to collaborate on several shows by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart (1895–1943), including On Your Toes (1938), and in Kurt Weill and Moss Hart's Lady in the Dark (1940), with its dream sequences. She moved to Hollywood to work with the producer Arthur Freed (1894–1973), for whom she designed costumes for many films, among them Meet Me in St Louis (1944), and sets and costumes for the ballet in An American in Paris (1951). She also designed costumes for several Samuel Goldwyn productions, including Guys and Dolls (1956). Apart from musicals, she also designed for such films as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) and her last film, Mommie Dearest (1981).