Robert J. Checchi; Award-Winning Set Decorator

Robert J. Checchi, award-winning television, film and stage decorator who won critical acclaim for his work on the innovative long-running play “Tamara,” has died. He was 67.

Checchi died Friday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center about two weeks after suffering a stroke.

A native of Pennsylvania, he earned a degree in architecture from the University of Texas and moved to Hollywood, where he became a set designer at CBS. He later left the network to become a free-lancer.

Checchi earned five Emmys and 13 Emmy nominations. His work included the television series “Growing Pains” and highly praised television films such as “Sarah, Plain and Tall.”

He won the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle award for transforming an American Legion hall on Highland Avenue into the Italian villa Il Vittoriale, where audiences have followed “Tamara” casts from room to room for more than a decade. Checchi worked the same magic on an armory for the shorter-running New York version of the play. He also won a Dramalogue award for his work on “Tamara.”

“Robert Checchi’s decor . . . remains wonderfully overdone--everything you’ve suspected about fascist taste but never thought you’d see firsthand,” former Los Angeles Times theater critic Dan Sullivan wrote on a second tour of the play in 1985. “A coffee table magazine recently printed a color spread on the real Il Vittoriale. Our version is, if anything, classier.”

Checchi is survived by a brother, two sisters, and several nieces and nephews.

A memorial service is scheduled at 9 a.m. Saturday, July 10, at the Church of the Hills, Forest Lawn, Hollywood Hills.