John Bryan

Award-winning art director John Bryan used his eye for detail and keen sense of space and color to create atmospheric environments in everything from the critically acclaimed "Great Expectations" to the quasi-historical epic "Caesar and Cleopatra." Bryan started working in the '30s on the sets of films like the British family drama "The Song of the Road" and landed his first major art direction position on "Pygmalion," adapted from the George Bernard Shaw play about a Victorian speech coach who bets he can teach a lower-class woman to speak like, and be taken for, a proper lady. The '40s proved a pivotal decade for Bryan; he won his only Oscar for his work on "Great Expectations," based on Charles Dickens's famous novel about a poor orphan whose life is changed by an anonymous benefactor, and he reunited with director Gabriel Pascal on "Caesar and Cleopatra," another Shaw adaptation centered on the unlikely relationship between the two powerful rulers. A few years later he served as the set designer of David Lean's "Oliver Twist," which featured a career-best performance from English actor Alec Guinness as the pitiable Fagin. After spending much of the '50s producing films, he returned to his production roots with "Becket," an Oscar-nominated drama that chronicles the turbulent relationship between an English king (Peter O'Toole) and his once-close confidant (Richard Burton).