Ann Bishop Roth (born October 30, 1931) is an American costume designer. In a career spanning over six decades, she is recognized for her prolific work across stage and screen. She has received various accolades, including two Academy Awards, two BAFTA Awards, and a Tony Award.
Roth gained prominence for her collaborations with directors John Schlesinger, Mike Nichols, Anthony Minghella, and Stephen Daldry. She has been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Costume Design five times, winning two awards for The English Patient (1996) and Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (2020). She has also received four nominations for the BAFTA Award for Best Costume Design, winning for The Day of the Locust (1975) and Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. Roth, at the age of 91, makes a cameo appearance and shares a pivotal scene with Margot Robbie in Greta Gerwig's fantasy comedy film Barbie (2023).[2]
Roth was born in Hanover, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Eleanor and James Roth.[1] Roth is a Carnegie Mellon graduate who began her career as a scenery painter for the Pittsburgh Opera. She intended to remain in the field of production design until she met Irene Sharaff at the Bucks County Playhouse. Sharaff invited her to California to assist her with costumes on the film Brigadoon and suggested Roth apprentice with her for five films and five Broadway productions before setting out on her own.[3]
Roth's first Hollywood film was 1964's The World of Henry Orient, where her designs included "monogrammed handmade yellow silk pajamas" for glamorous womanizer Peter Sellers.[2]
According to Glenn Frankel, Roth "designed not just costumes but characters" for the 1969 film Midnight Cowboy.[4][5] Roth found elegant but grimy white pants for Dustin Hoffman's character Ratso Rizzo on street-sale tables in New York City. Because Jon Voight's fringed suede jacket had to "look real and unhip," Roth made it herself. For Brenda Vaccaro's socialite character to wear in a sex scene, Roth paid $200 for a fox-fur jacket owned by one of her neighbors.[6]
Roth as costume designer created a "show-stopping" nightgown for Barbra Streisand to wear in her first non-musical film The Owl and the Pussycat (1970). The short black nightgown featured appliqué pink hands cupping the breasts[7] and (to quote Roth's own description, "a heart on her pee-pee."[2] Interviewed in 2013 about the origins of the costume idea, Roth said that her research included "looking for dirty, erotic, skuzzy underwear" in the pornographic magazine Screw, after which "somehow or another I made it up."[8] Roth later re-used her hands-on-breasts design for the 2013 stage play The Nance,[8] which won that year's Tony Award for costume design.[9]
Roth's first Oscar nomination was for 1984's Places in the Heart, set in Depression-era Texas.[10] Roth persuaded Sally Field that, for her "going-into-town-to-ask-for-a-loan-at-the-bank" scenes, a 1930s-type crotchless girdle would help her to walk and sit the right way.[2] The costume Oscar that year, however, went to Miloš Forman's Amadeus.[11]
Roth's costumes for three distinct time frames in The English Patient (1996) earned her first Oscar. According to producer Saul Zaentz, Roth worked for half her usual salary on the film "because she believed in the screenplay."[12] Roth's research for the costumes included the British Royal Geographical Society archives and 1930s photos of Egypt by photojournalist Lee Miller. Many of the film's varied military uniforms were authentic from the period; others were copied line-for-line from originals by a Savile Row tailor.[13][14]
Also in 1996, Roth did costumes for The Birdcage, a comedy film starring starring Robin Williams and Nathan Lane as the flamboyant owners of a Florida drag club. Talking about his costume, Williams remembered "those ballroom pants and the silk shirts with the shoulder pads. The details were amazing. This was a guy who was still living in the ’70s. The clothes captured exactly who Armand was for me."[12]
Her most-awarded film was 2020's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, where her costume designs (including flapper costumes and a rubber body suit for Viola Davis based on the body measurements of Aretha Franklin) won the Costume Designers Guild Award for Excellence in Period Film, Britain's BAFTA, and the Academy Award for Best Costume Design.[15]
In the 2023 film Barbie, Roth appears onscreen in a cameo role, portraying and credited as "the woman on a bench." In the scene, Barbie sits down besides Roth and tells the 91 year-old that she is "so beautiful", and Roth responds with a smile, "I know it."[2] In a Rolling Stone interview, director Greta Gerwig said that the brief scene "doesn’t lead anywhere" but "If I cut the scene, I don’t know what this movie is about."[16] Maureen Dowd in The New York Times described Roth's interaction with Barbie as a "pivotal scene."[2]
Roth's more than one hundred screen credits for costume design include The World of Henry Orient, Midnight Cowboy, Klute, Working Girl, Silkwood, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Mambo Kings, The Birdcage, Primary Colors, Cold Mountain, Closer, Freedomland, The Good Shepherd, Margot at the Wedding, Mamma Mia!, Evening, and Ma Rainey's Black Bottom.
Roth's dozens of stage credits include The Odd Couple, The Star-Spangled Girl, Purlie, Seesaw, They're Playing Our Song, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Biloxi Blues, Butley, The Vertical Hour, Deuce, and The Waverly Gallery.
Work as a costume designer[18]
Ms. Roth has a pivotal scene with Margot Robbie in the "Barbie" movie, directed by her friend Greta Gerwig (Ms. Roth calls her "Gret").
Roth told me she starts from a simple premise: she doesn't just make costumes; she makes characters. The idea was to find the clothes Ratso would have bought from the places he would have bought them—or, in his case, the places he might have stolen them from
As Midnight Cowboy's wildly talented costume designer Ann Roth demonstrated, clothes could mean as much, psychologically, as a performance or a line of dialogue
Her outfit featured a polka dot pattern and diamantés sewn into the spaghetti strap top. The unusual blouse also boasted a pattern cut in the shape of hands over either breast.
A Brooklyn fashion designer is suing Yoko Ono for $10 million, claiming she ripped off her sexy clothing line featuring flimsy fabrics, cutouts and "hands" positioned over strategic body parts – a look made famous in 1970 by Barbra Streisand in the smash film The Owl and the Pussycat.
There are very few people who have done as much in the 30s as I have," she says, "but when I did English Patient, I wouldn't have dreamed of doing it without starting research again.
Roth, a native of Hanover, York County, has lived in Martins Creek since 1969, when she moved there from Manhattan with her husband, the now-deceased lighting designer Harry Green.
Relying on such sources as the British Royal Geographic Society archives, including photos of a map-making expedition believed to have included de Almasy, Roth learned that, on safari, the men occasionally dressed in suits and the women in furs.
In October, she received her third Lifetime Achievement Award—this, the Ming Cho Lee Award from the Henry Hewes Design Awards. She also has the Irene Sharaff Award from the Theater Development Fund and a place in the Theater Hall of Fame on the walls of the Gershwin.
I love that scene so much. And the older woman on the bench is the costume designer Ann Roth. She's a legend.