Art Director Boris Leven, 78, Academy Award Winner, Dies

Boris Leven, a Russian-born artist who came to the United States in 1927 and at his death had won one Academy Award and been nominated for seven others, has died of cancer.

One of the film industry’s best-known art directors and production designers, Leven was 78 and died in Los Angeles Saturday after a long struggle with cancer.

The winner of the art direction Oscar for “West Side Story” (1961), Leven began sketching at Paramount Studios after moving to Hollywood from New York in the early l930s.

Here he earned a degree in architecture from USC after earlier studies at the Beaux Arts Institute of Design in New York and gradually worked his way to full screen credit with “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” in 1938, which also became the first of his Academy nominations.

Other films for which he was nominated were “Shanghai Gesture,” “Giant,” “Sound of Music,” “The Sand Pebbles,” “Star” and “Andromeda Strain.”

Additional films for which he designed sets or managed graphics included “New York, New York” (director Martin Scorsese hired him because of his background in period films of the 1940s involving Manhattan), “The King of Comedy,” “The Last Temptation of Christ,” which was never completed, “Tales of Manhattan,” “The Shocking Miss Pilgrim,” “The New Centurions,” “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” and the not-yet released “The Color of Money.”

In addition to his studio work, Leven was an artist of local renown. His oils and watercolors have been displayed in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and USC.

He is survived by his wife, Vera, who asks contributions in his memory to the American Cancer Society.