Danilo Donati; Oscar-Winning Designer Was 75

Danilo Donti, who won Oscars for his costumes in Federico Fellini’s “Casanova” and Franco Zeffirelli’s “Romeo and Juliet,” has died in Rome. He was 75.

Donati died Saturday night in his home, said an official for the latest film he was working on, Roberto Benigni’s “Pinocchio.” The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that the cause of death wasn’t known and that Donati had seemed to be in good health just a few days earlier while working on the film, which was being shot in Terni, a town near Rome.

Donati was designing sets for “Pinocchio,” which is expected to be ready in about a year. He had also designed sets for Benigni’s Oscar-winning “Life Is Beautiful.”

“We’ll miss him. What can you say when a man like him, a tireless worker, dies so suddenly?” Fabrizio Lombardo, a Miramax film company official in Rome, told the Italian news agency ANSA.

Donati’s costumes for Zeffirelli’s popular interpretation of the Shakespeare tale of doomed lovers from Verona won him his first Academy Award in 1968. A second Oscar followed in 1976 for the Fellini film on another kind of lover, the tireless Casanova.

Donati also won Italian film awards for other works, including another Fellini film, “Ginger and Fred.” Among his other films was Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “The Gospel According to St. Matthew.”

Born in northern Italy in 1926, Donati studied in Florence to become a muralist and fresco painter.

He spent several years as supervising art director at RAO, Italy’s national television network, before making his professional debut as a costume designer for a Luchino Visconti theater production in 1954. He moved to cinema 10 years later.

In addition to Visconti stage and opera productions and films, Donati designed several public spectacles.

Known for his rich use of color, textiles and sequins or furs that rippled in special lighting, he was frequently compared with the great Hollywood costume designers of the 1930s.

In addition to costuming the memorable films of Fellini, Zeffirelli and Pasolini, Donati excelled in designing imaginative garb for such lighter fare as Dino De Laurentiis’ 1980 film, “Flash Gordon.”

Donati managed to enhance, never thwart, the vision of the strong directors he worked for, yet always left his own stamp on the finished production.

Details about survivors and plans for any funeral services were not immediately available.