Gene Callahan; Oscar-Winning Set Designer

Academy Award-winning art director and set designer Gene Callahan, praised for his warm, often elegant settings in more than 50 movies and 1,000 television programs, has died at 67.

He died Wednesday at his home in Baton Rouge, La., of a heart attack. Callahan won an Oscar in 1961 for his set-designing work in “The Hustler,” starring Paul Newman and Jackie Gleason, and in 1963 for art direction in “America, America.” He received a third Academy Award nomination in 1963 for “The Cardinal” and a fourth in 1976 for “The Last Tycoon.”

Callahan, a Baton Rouge native, once described his work in an interview with the Associated Press.

“As a production designer, I am responsible for the ‘look’ of the show--from locations, or exterior scenes, and how they are to be shot, to the design (of the) sets themselves, their constructions, their painting, and then the set decoration. Sometimes I design the titles too.”

His work ranged from building a village in Greece to painting a mountainside a different shade to building shores in Turkey.

Callahan, who began his career in the 1940s designing opera sets at Louisiana State University, recently worked as production designer for the movie “Steel Magnolias,” shot in Natchitoches, La.

He also was a production designer for such films as “The Group,” “The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart” and “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds.”

As set decorator, his many film credits included “Butterfield 8,” “Splendor in the Grass,” and “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”

As art director, he earned film credits for “Funny Girl,” “The Stepford Wives,” “Julia,” “The Eyes of Laura Mars,” “Seems Like Old Times,” “Whose Life Is It Anyway?” “Grease II,” “Places in the Heart” and “Children of a Lesser God.”